USB product placement

Last night I received an email invitation to my friend Ben Finn's Christmas Party. Ben, as you may know, recently sold his musical notation software company, Sibelius, to Avid, and is now looking forward to a life of leisure!

One of Ben's other guests, Simon, sent out a 'reply to all' saying that he's also celebrating, having just launched his new invention, USB Cell. Despite the slightly cheeky viral promotion going on here (which I'm now participating in, of course), I have to say that this is a very convenient product, and I'm certainly going to order a pair out of curiosity. It's the kind of thing I can imagine my parents finding useful for their TV remotes as well.

One thing that was also in his email was a link comparing the interest in his product with other well-established battery brands, at Alexaholic.com, which is a really useful site that produces graphs of one site's traffic against another (or several others), so I just thought I'd flag this up here for any webmasters who might find it worthwhile.

The USB battery idea reminds me of one aspect of my 1998-1999 stint in PC World. Intel had launched USB as a connection specification in November 1997, but it really wasn't catching on by the point at which I started working at PC World in mid-1998. There were hardly any products being retailed that used the interface, the few that were available had patchy support from Windows 98, and customers weren't aware of any advantages the peripheral standard offered them. The only product that we actually had to offer customers was a Hewlett-Packard USB scanner, which cost about twice as much for the USB version as for its parallel-port equivalent. Not a rosy picture for USB, then.

This all changed when Apple introduced its USB-only iMac. PC World had at this point stopped stocking Macs altogether, in the latter days of Gil Amelio's leadership of the company. When Jobs came back and introduced the iMac, a fast (relatively) affordable Mac specifically for home use, suddenly all of the local retailers were all over it like a rash. Tesco were shifting them by the bucketload, and PC World was missing out on the sales the iMac was drawing. Eventually someone at head office decided we were to start selling them as well. The release of the iMac pushed Epson into releasing a decent mid-range USB printer (the SC740), which we started to get shipped to us, as well as various popular solutions to the lack of a floppy drive in the iMac (such as the Imation Superdisk 120 and an Iomega USB Zip drive). Initially these products were still a fair bir more expensive than their parallel, and even SCSI, counterparts; which was fairly ridiculous. Still, once on the shelves they moved quickly, and turned USB into a more popular standard that people became familiar with, both for Macs and PCs. Soon all of the PCs we sold started to ship with internal USB ports, not just the capability of supporting it on their motherboards. Fast forward 8 years or so, and USB is everywhere. For it to move from being a theoretically advantageous standard with little foothold in the market, to being available to power and connect things as diverse as sound desks and missile launchers (thanks, Frank) is really quite a noteworthy transformation. I actually have more of a leaning toward Firewire peripherals for many of the things people try to do with USB, but it's still proven to be an incredibly useful addition to modern life, and I'm always intrigued to see where it appears next.