The Inventor

Andy Rubin's

He was born on June 22, 1946 in New Bedford, USA. He is known as the Inventor of Android OS which is an operating system that is widely used in smartphones today. Since childhood, Rubin has been accustomed to seeing many new gadgets. This is because his father, a psychologist who swerved into the direct marketing business, kept the electronic products he would sell in Rubin's room. He has a great interest in everything that smells of robots.

At Carl Zeiss A.G., where he first worked after graduating from college, Rubin was placed in a robotics division, precisely on digital communication between networks and measurement devices and manufacturing. After Carl Zeiss, he worked in the field of robots in a company in Switzerland.

Rubin's career in robotics seems to be getting brighter, but his life changed because of a vacation on Cayman Island in 1989. While visiting the tropical islands of Jamaica, Rubin accidentally met a man named Bill Caswell. This man was sleeping by the beach, driven from a cottage after a fight with his girlfriend. Andy offers the man a place to live and in return, Casswell offers him a job.

The amazing coincidence is that the man works at Apple. At Apple, Rubin had a great time. At the time, Apple was still in good shape thanks to Macintosh computers. Apple culture is also contagious to Rubin. There he did some pranks, such as reprogramming the phone system so he could pretend to be the CEO, John Sculley. Such a joke would probably have liked Steve Jobs, a man who likes to make jokes over the phone, but when it was Apple's period without Jobs.

From manufacturing, Rubin moved to research at Apple. Then, in 1990, Apple spun off to form a company called General Magic and Rubin joined in. General Magic focuses on the development of handheld and communication devices.

Engineers, including Rubin of course, managed to develop a software called Magic Cap. Unfortunately, Magic Cap did not get a reception from handset and telecommunications companies. Some who apply Magic Cap only do so for a short while. General Magic was finally destroyed.

Some developers at General Magic, along with some Apple veterans, later founded Artemis Research. The company developed something called webTV, an early attempt to combine the Internet with television. Rubin joined Artemis to co-develop the webTV. When Microsoft bought Artemis, in 1997, Rubin joined the giant company.

Rubin's crazy episodes are back at Microsoft. Rubin built a robot equipped with a camera to prank his colleagues. Instead, the robot was connected to the Internet and in one incident was breached by parties outside Microsoft. In 1999, Rubin quit webTV (and that is, he is no longer a Microsoft employee). He later rented a shop in Palo Alto, California, and called it a laboratory.

PROJECT ‘SIDEKICK’

In a place full of various Rubin's toy robot collection, an idea for a new product was born. Together with some of his colleagues, Rubin later founded Danger Inc. Danger achieved success through a device called Sidekick. Originally, the device was named Danger Hiptop, but in the market it was known as the T-Mobile Sidekick.

At present, Sidekick does look outdated, but in his time, Sidekick is an odd object with a concept of technology that transcends the times. The device, according to Rubin, is a data accesser with phone capabilities. When it comes to the market, Sidekick has to face the fact that the PDA is losing the market. However, Rubin insists that Sidekick is not a PDA.

Now, what Rubin said is not strange anymore. Just look at Apple with millions of third-party apps coming to the iPhone. Another thing Danger did, which at that time was unthinkable, was bridge between handset makers and network providers. Danger decided to share the profits with T-Mobile in the Sidekick service. Thus, Danger does not rely on handset sales as the sole source of income, but also from its services. This makes the device maker company (Danger) has the same goal as the device seller (telecommunication operator T-Mobile).

The remaining executives from Danger were merged by Microsoft into the Mobile Communication Business, of the Entertainment and Devices divisions. Then, they were asked to develop a phone known as Project Pink.

The target, this phone should be a competitor iPhone and BlackBerry. According to ComputerWorld, Project Pink suffers from a classic disease at a major corporation. Because the project is quite prestigious, it is contested by several parties. And even worse, the development is more deviated than desired. For example, initially the phone will be developed on the basis of Java but then asked to use the Microsoft operating system.

Unfortunately, Windows Phone 7, which should be used for Project Pink, is not ready. As a result, when launched, the phone which was finally named Microsoft Kin uses the Windows operating system for phones that are “lawas”.

The cold market welcome also made Kin finally have to be closed, just a few months since its launch. The fate of the Sidekick service, which Microsoft inherited from Danger, is also not very good. In one incident, which is still not known exactly what caused it, Sidekick customers suddenly lost all their data. One thing to know, all data on Sidekick is indeed stored ‘ in cloud’ (in this case on a server managed by Microsoft and can be accessed via the Internet). Well, when the server was interrupted, all user data Sidekick vanished.

THE ANDROID OPERATING SYSTEM

In early 2002, Rubin gave a lecture at Stanford on the development of Sidekick. Because, although the sale of Sidekick on the market did not explode, the device was considered quite good in terms of engineering. It just so happened that Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google co-founders, attended the lecture. After college, Page found Rubin to see Sidekick up close.

Apparently, Page saw, the device was using the Google search engine. “Keren,” Page said. This was a starting point for Page for an idea that in a few years would come true, a Google phone. About two years after that, Rubin had left Danger and tried to do new things. These include trying to enter the digital camera business before he finally founded Android.

Rubin incubated Android when he became an entrepreneur-in-residence with venture capital firm Redpoint Ventures in 2004. “Android started from one simple idea, providing a robust and open mobile platform that can drive innovation faster for customer benefit,” said Rubin. In July 2005, 22 months after Android was founded, the company was swallowed up by Google. Rubin has also joined Google. When buying Android Inc., Google did not specify in detail what price it paid and what it did with the company. In fact, Google called the purchase an acquisition of human resources and technology only. In addition to Andy Rubin, Google did scoop up a lot of brilliant people from Android.

These include Andy McFadden (a WebTV developer with Rubin, as well as developer Moxi Digital); Richard Miner (former Vice President at telecommunications company Orange); chris White (founder of Android and designer of WebTV displays and interfaces).

With Google, Android is given extra power. The Mountain View, California-based company later formed the Open Handset Alliance to develop devices for Android.

Android devices on the market are not made by Google. Android heavyweights including Motorola, Samsung, and HTC each threw their flagship Android phones to the market. In the US, the Motorola Droid is one of Verizon Wireless' weapons against AT&T with its iPhone. While Nexus One, Google's Android phone made by HTC, comes without “katan das” on one particular operator.