Programming Provocateurs

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Pressler says MobiTV has similar potential: to create a multimedia entertainment product "like TiVo minus the DVR." Pressler, 34, hits the age of the average employee on the nose and falls into the main demographic of MobiTV's subscribers. This "scary playful" company, he says, is riding on the talents and creativity of people just like him. That's the fun of it.

"I hope that something strikes large in the company," he says. Perhaps it will be Pressler. MobiTV outsourced the design of a demo it needed for a consumer-electronics show, and over two months the Manhattan-based firm that got the job produced many designs. But one that Pressler did for another product beat them all. "That was my shining moment thus far," he says.

Seated in his cubicle, flanked by a succulent cactus and a miniature wooden mannequin (today posing as Frankenstein), Pressler says he will stick around for a while, and then perhaps find another hot ticket. "'A while' used to mean 10 years," he says, reflecting on his answer. "It's two to four years in these parts. The pace is accelerated in Silicon Valley."

KAY JOHANSSON MISSES THE dark chocolate he got at home in Sweden. But he knows that giving up the sweet treat is a small price to pay for moving from Popwire, a former Ericsson company in Stockholm, to MobiTV last September. As chief technology officer, Johansson, 37, has been making bets on changing the media-delivery game on mobile telephones (of which he owns three) since 2000. You might think of him as MobiTV's cartographer, the one who creates the technology road map and links strategy with scale to grow the start-up into a mature company. "I've made every mistake in the book," says Johansson confidently. But that's assuming there is a book for the nascent industry.

At Popwire, which launched the first TV broadcast over a 3G network with Ericsson in 2000, Johansson helped develop an end-to-end media-streaming infrastructure. More recently, he has watched European carriers give up trying to create mobile-TV services in-house and start looking for outside vendors to handle them, which is MobiTV's opportunity. It's a classic make-or-buy situation; Johansson is in the middle of it. Says he: "They are the brand name. We are the one to run this service and develop the technology."

For a kid who wanted to be an exobiologist or a physicist, Johansson has found his dream job developing technologies and solutions unheard of five years ago. He says TV on mobiles requires a new paradigm: "It's a new way of consuming contents. I don't see any limits to what we can do."

To give shape to that new paradigm is MobiTV's adoption of the WiMAX standard, a.k.a. "wi-fi on crack." It combines unicast (a stream to a single user at a time, like the Internet) and broadcast, increasing capacity to allow higher data rates, two-way communication and so on. "We're just beginning to scratch the surface," he says. Maybe he'll eventually get it to download chocolate bars.

IN A YOUNG COMPANY, IT IS sometimes helpful not to know what you're not supposed to accomplish. Desiree Rodriguez packed for a six-week assignment in London to build up MobiTV's presence in Britain. As a twentysomething new hire who parachuted into business development at a start-up relatively unknown overseas, she half expected to be shown the door at Turner Broadcasting or Channel 4 before getting a word in. But they, like others in Britain, saw the value in getting their programming on the rapidly expanding number of mobile devices.

Two years and 25 deals later, Rodriguez, 26, decamped from the thriving London office for Emeryville. As director of business development, she's ready to work with partners like Viacom, NBC and Turner and target other major media companies. The mission is to program--and monetize--their content for mobile phones. Rodriguez plans to help expand MobiTV's role as a distributor that fashions content into made-for-mobile programs such as Fox Sports and ABC News Now as well as unique content channels. "At the end of the day, we're an enabler," she says with buoyant vitality, accented by hair nearly as orange as her patent-leather shoes.

Given her enthusiasm, it comes as no surprise when Rodriguez says she works at MobiTV for the people. She has fed off the excitement of the start-up since the day she came to work, her laptop and mobile phone in tow. Her work ethic, she says, comes from her entrepreneurial family and a father who has done everything from construction to property development. Having grown up on a ranch as the youngest of five, she jokes that she was on the family payroll at age 5.

In a way, she's reliving that 24-hour work experience. "Friends think I'm sold on the Kool-Aid," she says. "But at midnight there are others working alongside me. Here I have the energy like I'm working with my family: you butt heads sometimes, but at the end of the day you're all about sink or swim."

A BIG PART OF JACK HALLAHAN'S job--though he does it naturally--is to notice when old things become new again. For instance, stop-motion, a technique he obsessed over as an 8-year-old making faux commercials with his older brother on a Super 8 camera, is back in music videos. Branded entertainment, which put the soap in daytime TV, is resurfacing in reality TV and Second Life. And of course, television, the 65-year-old killer app.

For an adman who grew up wanting to be in advertising and now confesses to "a seriously bad case of arrested development," it would seem that "newness" to Hallahan is the return of "relevance." And as MobiTV's Department of One, he is all about relevance, specifically as it relates to MobiTV and persuading advertisers to put their messaging on its network. "You have to be relevant and entertaining, and you have to be on your game," he tells them.

A mobile phone presents a new level of engagement for advertisers. It is one-to-one, he says, and for them "that is both the upside and the challenge." Once they get it in their hands, "they start to awaken. You can see they're trying to figure out, 'Where can this go? I need to get here.'"