I did the Sidekick launch for T-Mobile as a 3rd party contractor under Publicis USA. The team doing the web launch was run by some friends of mine.

Hello.

I'm almost positive I had lunch with Chris DiSalvo at least once. If he's who I'm thinking of, he was young, friendly, cocky and full of enthusiasm. But then, I might be thinking of this guy.

There were a few things that were cool about the Sidekick. It was a texting machine. It had a lot of battery life. That little flippy thing it did was pretty slick. But the web browser was a joke. It was slow as a snail. And no matter how revolutionary you want to paint it, it was competing with the XDA, which ran Windows, Excel, Word and Acrobat, could play your MP3s and WMAs, would open an FTP client or Terminal session and didn't require everything it did be sandboxed within Danger's world.

That was the Sidekick's ultimate undoing: yeah, it was slow but if you're a celebrity (and Danger courted celebrities with zeal), all you give a shit about is texting and snapping selfies so who cares. The problem was that Danger never integrated with T-Mobile. It lived on its own servers, using T-Mobile's bandwidth a lot like a 3rd party vendor. Except they were sold and supported by T-Mobile, which means whenever anything went wrong, T-Mobile pointed at Danger, which was understaffed. So Danger gave the keys to the kingdom to T-Mobile support. So socially engineering your way into the system wasn't hard at all.

Particularly when your rescue question is "what is the name of your favorite pet?"

Paris Hilton's account got hacked not once, but twice. Gawker put it all up online; you can find it if you search. And at that point the celebrities were a fart in the wind, everyone else cracked about how insecure it was and anybody "techy" who was looking for a hot phone was using HTC, same as it ever was.