Is Blackberry in Danger?

Both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have head-scratching pieces on the doings of a Silicon Valley startup called Danger Research – quite a feat for a company that is “trying to keep a low profile,” in the words of the Times’ top tech reporter, John Markoff. “The company isn’t talking about what it is doing,” The Journal’s Lisa Bransten writes. If that’s so, somebody else certainly is, because both reports seem to know quite a bit about Danger.

The article is one of several Markoff has done in recent weeks (his profile of the startup Rearden Steel was another), perhaps as a public service, to demonstrate to the world that serious invention is still going on in Silicon Valley. Danger, he writes, has developed a wireless device that sends and receives data. It’s meant to compete with Research in Motion’s two-way Blackberry pagers. The devices run on Sun Microsystems’ Java technology and are meant to take advantage of the coming 2.5G networks that will bring faster wireless bandwidth.