A good friend, Allan MacKinnon, has been going crazy for the last week about a new device that’s not targeted at him at all; the Peek, a mobile device which looks like a smart phone but is strictly dedicated to serving up e-mail.  Check out this post for a quick summary about how the Peek “is targeted strictly at non-techies that don’t have e-mail on their phones and don’t care to figure it out, either. It even says ‘not for hardcore techies’ right on the box.”

Though Allan’s a hardcore techie, he has a history of seeing things before others do so I decided to check this thing out.

When he mentioned the Peek, my first reaction: Why do I need a second device?  My “Upon Further Reflection” reaction:  There is something to be said for……”purpose built” devices that don’t try to be all things to all people, like the Kindle (with it’s cool screen from Eink) for reading books.

Though Allan has a smartphone which is constantly announcing, “You’ve got mail!” (albeit with a tone and not the AOL voice), I like NOT having my email on my phone.  I want a phone that is (a) tiny but also (b) lasts for days on one charge.  And I don’t want people to think I can send / receive emails 7 X 24.  If I (or they) need immediate access I (or they) can (a) place a voice call (a novel idea in this digital age!) or (b) text.  The forced brevity of a text is perfect for the environment when someone is on the go (as I noted in this earlier post.)

But what about if I really want / need email when my laptop is off-line, like to see an important inquiry from a prospect?  This “Peek” would be just the ticket!  And the fact that the company has distribution lined up with Target, a retailer that is aligned with the target (no pun intended) market is brilliant; so many great products die because distribution was not available or not properly aligned with the targeted audience.

Hmmmm, it’s Labor Day, perfect time to get that Christmas wish-list started!

In an earlier post I discussed the consistent process I take the first week of each interim CEO / COO assignment.  As noted, though my process is consistent across companies, the resultant actions taken are often quite different from company to company.  My strangest -– but in hindsight maybe my most effective –- first action was as interim COO at a $20+ million, unprofitable software company: The first thing I did was clean the company kitchen!

Little did I know that -– before the last clean mug was in the strainer -– word traveled to the company’s remote offices in London, Dubai, and Perth that there was a new kid on the block and he was taking no prisoners.  Unknown to me at the time, the foundation for a rapid turnaround was in place.

Arriving 45 minutes early that first day -– it’s amazing what you find out about a company arriving 45 minutes early on the first day –- the only employees in the office were four individual contributors having coffee in the company kitchen; a ridiculously extravagant kitchen any TopChef chef would die for.

I was told that the only available coffee cups were in the pile that filled the sink -– a pile of dirty dishes, it was noted, that was indicative of two of the company’s problems. First, that management was unable to make tough decisions.  And second that people who had once cared deeply for the company had grown discouraged and didn’t give a damn about even the smallest things any more.

When the board told management to cut the payroll, management decided to fire the lowest paid person in the company -– the cleaning lady -– rather than some high-priced-but-ineffective VP.  And employees who once cared enough about the company to pitch in and help had long ago thrown in the towel and given up working very hard.

At that moment, something inside me said, “Take off of your jacket and tie, roll up your sleeves, and clean the kitchen.”  Two of the four workers quickly exited –- I now realize to spread the word about the new, crazed COO -– while the other two pitched in and helped me clean up.

The time cleaning was well spent.  These two were a wealth of information about what the company’s problems really were vs. the conflicting views I obtained from various board members.  And I loved the look on the CEO’s face when he walked in just as we were nearly finished, shook his head, turned, and headed towards his office: He clearly understood that things were going to change at the company he had founded!

When nearly done with the dishes, I asked for a couple of favors:  Could they ask HR to see if the cleaning lady was willing to come back to work starting today.  And could they spread the word that the next person I caught leaving a mess for their fellow employees to clean up –- be it a dirty cup, some sloppy code, or an inaccurate sales forecast –- would be shown the door.

Turns out I never had to show anyone the door.

This ended up being one of the easiest turnarounds.  The ‘hangers on’ who were just there to collect a paycheck -– including two of the VPs –- quickly realized that the best course of action was to find the exit door on their own.  And those key individual contributors — the most important ingredient for a rapid turnaround — rose to the occasion, allowing us to reach sustainable profitability within the first quarter.

Oh, and yes; you could walk into the kitchen at any time and it was clean; just like the code in the next release of software and just like the sale forecasts for the next quarter!

And to think it all started with a pile of dirty dishes!

If you want your customers to access your web site via their mobile phone, you may want to scan a blog post titled “10 Biggest Mistakes in Mobile Marketing.” The author talks about the problems with viewing web sites on mobile browsers.  He ends the post by saying, “To solve the last mistake – not taking into account how every phone is different and needs customization – buy a Device Atlas from us so you’ll know exactly what work needs to be done.”

I’d end the post by saying, “Don’t use a web browser in the first place; instead use……a mobile application that delivers to your customer exactly the info they want in a format that is mobile-phone-friendly.”  But nobody’s asking me!

There are a three ‘nuggets’ in the post:

1.  Do not treat mobile USERS like PC users.  Think about how their needs are different – the user is on the go; they have different things that they want to do; they have different constraints.

2.  Do not treat mobile DEVICES like PCs.  Think about the numerous differences between mobiles and PCs:  screen size, lack of a mouse (and printer), smaller keyboard, limited bandwidth, pricing for megabyte usage, etc.

3.  Do remember to exploit the capabilities of the phone.  To satisfy the customer’s needs, use the capabilities that ARE in a phone (but NOT in a PC) like the ability to make a call!  Or to send a text, take a picture / video.  Or to be aware of the device’s location, etc.

In my view, the combination of these three things -– the different needs and constraints of the user, the constraints of a mobile device vis-à-vis a PC, and the extended capabilities of a mobile device vis-à-vis a PC –- this combination is the reason why, for most situations, a mobile application — and not a mobile browser — is the way to go.

If you decide to read the post, the key meat can be found in Mistakes 1, 2, 3, and 10.

This month’s Mobile Monday-Boston certainly assembled an esteemed panel to address the decade-old problem of the dismally poor experience of using a mobile browser on your cell phone.  Yet how could so many brilliant minds after two hours of discussion not come up with a solution?

Easy.  Each panelist enjoys their cushy, high-paid ‘evangelist’ existence due to the deep pockets of a major corporation.  So, while each evangelist may in their heart-of-hearts know that an outside-the-box solution is what is required, their high flying lifestyle and hefty paycheck tell them to only offer up solutions that protect the franchise of their employer.  So Google suggests ‘better mobile search’, Mozilla proffers ‘small, mobile-specific browsers’ as the way to go, and Nokia says the answer is ‘a powerful OS like OpenSymbian.’

So with no viable solution offered, the three highlights of the night were:  (a) getting an unprecedented ‘look see’ at the posh, expensive, over-the-top, completely unnecessary digs of Orange Labs; (b) the great food and drink provided by Vlingo’s founder, speech recognition pioneer Mike Phillips (Question: Do Izhar Armony (Charles River Ventures) and Bob Davoli (Sigma Partners) know this is where Mike’s spending their money?); and (c) the comment by Franklin Davis of Nokia, equating the current mobile web browser experience to ‘looking at the web through a paper towel roll.’

The current mobile browser experience IS that bad.  And it’s getting worse: as one……audience member noted, mobile web browsing was actually a better experience ten years ago when the browsers were not much worse than they are today, but the web sites the browsers were attempting to display were far simpler; viewing these pages through that ‘paper towel roll’ wasn’t all that bad.

“What’s the big deal?” you ask.  True, most Americans don’t care, or even know, about this problem.  If we need to surf the web when we’re on the road, all we need to do is just stop at the next intersection, take our laptop into the Starbucks that’s surly there, and go online before the barrister has had time to deliver our triple Venti nonfat half-caff soy latte with 1 pump mocha, 1 pump caramel and 1 pump peppermint, low foam, non-fat whip with an extra protective sleeve.

But as the panelists pointed out, for much of the world the only access people have to the Internet is through their mobile.  The number of mobile phones sold last year was larger than the number of PCs already installed!  For more people than not, a mobile browser is the only browser they have to access the Internet.

So if the problem is real – and if it’s important to a good chunk of the world’s three billion mobile users – what’s the ‘outside the box’ solution that our esteemed panelists would offer if they were not worried about pissing off their employers?  They would do what Bill Gates did when he founded Microsoft; they’d suggest a solution that is 180 degrees opposed to the solution offered a generation ago when PCs first went on line.   (BTW, for a brilliant summary of Bill Gates’ career, check out The Economist’s “The meaning of Bill Gates”, a summary of his success and failures that only The Economists’ writers can achieve in just one page.)

Thinking today like Gates thought back then, our panelists would note that today’s mobile environment requires an on-line solution 180 degrees opposed of that of on-line PCs.  A dozen years ago, it was the advent of the Windows browser that resulted in the rapid uptake of on-line PC usage.  Simple jobs like on-line-banking were far easier to deliver to the masses as browser-based applications.

But today, the inherent and entrenched fragmentation of the mobile device industry requires the opposite solution.  Delivering services on small mobile devices with different operating systems requires powerful-yet-compact applications — true applications, not glorified markup, widgets, or other “toy” technologies.  Applications that can be written quickly – and only once – on an open platform.  Applications that can be immediately delivered over the air, and that will run on the majority of existing feature phones.

The iPhone is great, and smartphones are a blessing for those who can afford them.  But most of the world will for many years still be using Java-enabled MIDP 2.X mobile devices.   Delivering the mobile web to them requires a way to strengthen and extend the Java promise of “write once, run anywhere”.

None of the companies represented by the panelists will offer such a solution as each needs to protect their franchise.  But just as IBM suffered when it resisted Digital’s onslaught with the mini computer, and just as Digital died when it resisted the arrival of the desktop PC, in today’s mobile space Google, Mozilla, Nokia, Orange, etc. will suffer unless and until they recognize the need to bring a whole new set of capabilities to standard Java-enabled MIDP 2.X mobile devices -– capabilities such as vector graphics, real-time always-on “push” databases, worldwide fonts, and presence –- all through applications that can quickly be scripted and distributed direct to end users, by-passing the carriers.

Yes, that’s what the panelists would have offered, if only they could have spoken their minds honestly.

Thursday night was crazed in our house. Two sons were preparing for their last day of finals, followed by packing their trunks for summer camp, in turn followed by packing their suitcases for a pre-camp vacation week in Maine. My wife and I each had piles of unfinished work, followed by our getting packed for vacation. And we both needed to be out of the house before the boys awoke for early morning business meetings. Late at night, I turned on the Boston Celtics game fully expecting it to be over, having forgotten the ridiculously late tip off time. When I saw The Green down by over 20 points I shut it off immediately; Sunday would be another day.

As I headed up to join my wife in bed, I caught site of the huge pile of ironing which I had planed to get through during last Sunday’s game. Knowing that I needed some of these clothes for next week, I reluctantly headed to the basement to iron away. I first turned to a rebroadcast of the last inning of the 2007 Red Sox Mothers’ Day Miracle game; though I’ve seen it a dozen times, it never looses it’s appeal. I switched back to the Celtics only to discover them down by only 11. Wait; could they really pull this off? The rest, as they say, is history. The more I ironed, the more the Celtics scored. When I got through the pile, I didn’t dare stop ironing, my Irish superstition taking over. I ironed everything in sight — dishtowels, hankies, anything that allowed me, and the Celtics, to keep going.

So on Friday, listening to sports talk radio during my early morning drive to my 7:15 meeting, when caller after caller lamented not having stayed up to see what was being dubbed by many the greatest comeback game in NBA Final history, I was pleased that a pile of ironing allowed me to be one of the few people I knew who actually saw the game live!

I don’t think I’m a ‘new car snob’ – I’ve driven plenty of old cars, but each I acquired new.  So why – 35 years after my first car, a showroom-fresh Toyota Crown – is this used, full size Buick LeSabre sitting in our drive?  Two reasons.  First is our family’s April Fools ‘perfect storm’; the first week of April four things happening that decreed our small Volvo S40 – augmented with an antique 1964 Rambler Ambassador – would no longer suffice: My work location moved from just blocks from our Lexington home to downtown Boston; My wife’s new venture took her out of public transit and into a car; Our middle son got his license; And our oldest son returned home from college.  (Not to mention that a month earlier we adopted two large greyhounds.)  Clearly we needed another car! But why not a used Honda or Toyota, the ‘kids car’ of choice for most Lexingtonians?  The second reason for picking a Buick is the warning we received at Skid School, which both sons have now attended. In addition to teaching young drivers how to ‘handle the unexpected’ at highway speeds, Skid School teaches – lectures, really – parents that young drivers should only drive cars equipped with both ABS and side-impact airbags.  Although few used Hondas or Toyotas available for under five grand have both safety features, American Caddys and Buicks have been so equipped for years.  So, no, we don’t have distant, ancient relatives visiting us for the summer; that old bomber in the drive is our ‘new’ car!

Executives Online, a firm specializing in placing interim C-level executives in Europe, reports today that the demand for CEO / COO to perform Change Management has increased 220% in on one year. They attribute this dramatic increase in demand to a combination of the impact on all types of businesses of the problems in the financial markets, as well as the US recession.

This is good news for people (like me!) who specialize in interim ‘Change Agent’ type assignments.

I’ve finished my assignment as interim President and COO (reporting to the founding CEO, Omar Khudari) of independent video game developer, Cecropia. When I arrived in 2006, I managed a team of 75 that created The Act, a new style of video game that combines the appeal of an animated film with a simple game mechanic that anyone can enjoy — a video game that appeals to “the rest of us.” As a team, we navigated the challenge of finishing the game on time while simultaneously downsizing the operation significantly. As a company, we learned about creating a powerful, emotional connection between game players and interactive characters. Building on this knowledge, we have transitioned the company to where it can now develop a new kind of interactive advertisement, a Flash Comedy Skit, which could, in our view, become a key component of the Facebook strategy of large consumer products companies.

Check out two things on our updated web site: Under the Projects tab you can play games that are completed and get a ‘sneak peak’ of games in development. And under the Blog tab, read the 12 March 2008 post to answer the question we get asked every day, “What happened to The Act?

The recent MIT Enterprise Forum ‘Interactive Entertainment SIG’ event was another example of a side benefit of doing interim CEO / COO assignments – when each assignment is over I get time to ‘network’ at events like this (or the recent MIT / Polaris Venture event.)

This particular SIG is the brainchild of Michael Cavaretta member of the business-only law firm Morse Barnes-Brown Pendleton. Last summer The Boston Globe’s Hiawatha Bray wrote about how Boston has emerged as a video gaming hub, challenging similar regional hubs in Seattle and Austin. In his work, Michael sees many of the deals – both investment deals and development / publishing deals – being made by local game companies. Since the Boston-based game industry has historically operated in stealth mode, Michael formed this SIG as a way to promote the success of these local companies.

This meeting’s subject ‘Getting Started and Succeeding’ was addressed by a stellar panel of successful local game company CEOs including:…Jeff Anderson, Game Nirvana; Hank Howie, President, Blue Fang Games; and Omar Khudari, former CEO, Papyrus Design Group (and my boss at my last gig at Cecropia.) Game industry guru Rob Sebastian, CEO & Key Operating Partner, Ghost House Digital Studios flew in from LA and did a great job as moderator. Zeemote sponsored the night, providing plenty of food and drink as well has hands-on demonstrations of the world’s first compact wireless thumbstick for mobile gaming.

The good news for the audience was that we learned the details of how these folks raised money to start their successful ventures. The bad news was that – given the tremendous amount of consolidation that has happened in the industry, as well as the tremendous increase in the cost of developing a single game – the ability to raise funding today is a far more difficult challenge.

Last week’s “Triumph in Tech” event at the R&D Pub in MIT’s Stata Center was a success. Polaris Venture Partners and the MIT VCPE (Venture Capital and Private Equity) Club hosted the ‘round robin’ dinner – we changed tables after each course – with the purpose of bringing together three types of people: Venture Capitalists (looking to meet this year’s top graduates); MIT Sloan School MBA students, most from the Entrepreneurship & Innovation Program (looking to find a start-up that’ll hire them); and seasoned CEOs – people like me who Polaris asked to speak directly to the subject of the evening, “How Great Teams Come Together and Break Through to Success.”

Though I enjoyed talking about the teams I’ve pulled together in early-stage start-ups, turn arounds, or ‘growth-phase’ companies both here and in Europe, I enjoyed even more learning new ‘tricks of the trade’ from my contemporaries. Unfortunately I suspect some of the students did not enjoy the advice given by many of the CEOs: since start-ups don’t have the luxury to groom, you’ll not likely find a start-up willing to hire a fresh MBA grad for their executive team. So land a position – preferably in Bus Dev and / or Product Management – at a large, well run company with a strong management training program. Then come back in ten years and seek out your start-up.

This event was one of those win / win situations where all in attendance – the Polaris VCs, the MIT MBA candidates, and the CEOs – benefited.