Donna Dubinsky

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Donna Dubinsky (born July 4, 1955) has played an integral role in the development of personal digital assistants (PDAs) serving as CEO of Palm, Inc. and co-founding Handspring with Jeff Hawkins. Her management skills helped keep Palm Inc. financially viable after the failure of its pen computing software in the early 1990s. Fortune Magazine has nominated her together with Hawkins to the Innovators Hall of Fame while Time Magazine named the pair as part of its Digital 50 in 1999 for their contribution to the development of the PDA.

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[edit] Early years

From a Jewish background, Donna Dubinsky grew up in midwest Michigan, where her father worked as a scrap dealer. She went to a high school where armed guards had to keep order but eventually ended up going to Yale University where she majored in history and earned her bachelor's degree in 1977. Dubinsky then worked for the Philadelphia National Bank for a while before obtaining a MBA from Harvard Business School in 1981.

After graduating from Harvard Business School, she went to Apple Computer where she started work as a customer-support liaison. By 1985 she was running part of the company's distribution network. However, she became unhappy due to turf warfare within the company.

In 1986, Bill Campbell recruited her to a senior position in Claris, a software subsidiary of Apple. Dubinsky was responsible for international sales and marketing and within four years, her group was responsible for 50% of Claris's sales. However, Dubinsky decided to leave in 1991 when Apple decided not to spin out Claris into an independent company.

[edit] Palm Inc.

After a year's sabbatical in Paris to study French, Dubinsky met Jeff Hawkins through the introductions of Bill Campbell and Bruce Dunlevie. Hawkins was looking for a CEO to manage Palm Inc., which would join with other companies such as Tandy Corporation and Casio. The consortium produced a PDA called the Zoomer PDA on October 1993, just after the Apple Newton was released. Zoomer was a market failure along with similar products developed by Hewlett-Packard, Sharp and Toshiba.

By 1994, companies had spent a billion dollars to develop PDAs without any of them becoming commercially successful. Hawkins took a hard look at the previous products, and at all the feedback from the market, and proposed the idea for the product that eventually became the PalmPilot.

Palm Inc. decided to take full responsibility for the manufacture, programming and distribution of the new product which was code-named Touchdown. However, it struggled for a couple of years to find the financial support needed to bring the product to market. In 1995, U.S. Robotics acquired Palm Inc. for $44 million, bringing the Touchdown to market, originally as the Pilot 1000 and Pilot 5000.

The first PalmPilot went on sale in April 1996. After a few months, sales started ramping quickly. In its first 18 months, more than one million units of the PalmPilot had been sold. 3Com Corporation acquired U.S. Robotics, with its Palm subsidiary, in 1997.

[edit] Handspring Inc. and beyond

Dubinsky, Hawkins and Palm marketing manager Ed Colligan quickly became disillusioned with 3Com's plans for Palm Inc. and left in June 1998 to found Handspring. Their track record and the tech boom that was then underway in the US meant that the trio were easily able to finance their new company.

Dubinsky was the CEO of the new company which produced its first product, the Handspring Visor, by September 1999. The company decided to target the lower end of the market. Within a year, the company had managed to capture 25% of the market. Handspring ultimately became a leader in the market of smartphones with the Treo. In 2003, Handspring merged with Palm, Inc., having found that they had evolved in complementary directions, and that they would be far stronger by joining together. The company formed through the merger of Palm and Handspring, and the simultaneous spin-off of PalmSource, Palm's operating system group, was named palmOne. In 2005, palmOne was renamed to Palm, Inc., returning to its roots, and the independent PalmSource was acquired by Access Corporation of Japan.

Donna Dubinsky, together with Jeff Hawkins and Dileep George recently founded Numenta, Inc. to further develop the pattern recognition software termed as Hierarchical Temporal Memory.

Dubinsky serves as a director of Palm. She also serves on the board of the Computer History Museum in Mountain view, and recently was appointed to the Yale Corporation.

Dubinsky adopted a child from Russia in the mid 1990's and married Len Shustek in 2000.

[edit] External links

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