Programming Provocateurs

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He's a follower of his own advice. Hallahan, 45, had used a life coach to try to find a job that would be the perfect fit. An early adapter of MobiTV, he first came to the company as a partner of an ad firm to make a pitch for its business. The reverse happened. "What I saw here was the ability to lead the advertising community into new water," he says. "That for me was an interesting challenge because it's requiring a lot of the skills that I've acquired over the years." Having climbed a "significant learning curve" at MobiTV, Hallahan is focused on getting the user to interact with the advertiser through branded content and channels, as well as localized, targeted advertising. "I'm in a position to influence a lot of the things that are happening," he says. "I'm fortunate to be exposed on its earliest level--and driving some of it." It clearly drives him.

IT DOESN'T BOTHER JASON MIKAMI that people all over the world see and hear what goes on in his closet. In fact, it's his job to figure out what to do when they can't. Inside the network operations closet--"the NOC room"--time passes in 15-sec. increments. A wall of 14 flat screens blinks with paired images like a nightmarishly complex game of Memory.

Here, a few of Mikami's staff monitor about 200 audio and video channels for glitches in service for MobiTV's carriers. Can't hear XM Radio or NPR? Call Mikami. Frozen CNN video? Call Mikami--provided the rare instance that someone on his staff of 45 (up from 6 in April 2005) can't handle it. NOC-ers flag problems by closely analyzing snippets of audio and video contents. "The NOC folks act as the first tier and open up the trouble tickets and provide the meat of the information that allows our technical staff to handle the problem," says Mikami.

He's not here just to be MobiTV's head techie. The attraction is that the job is in new media and blends technology and business operations. He has a joint technical degree and M.B.A. and worked for about six years at Wink, a company for interactive TV, but craved "something small and new." He found it at MobiTV. "We're pioneers," he says. "I can't hire someone who has done my job before or mentor me in that way because it's never been done."

Years ago he would have given his left pinkie to be the 12th man on the Golden State Warriors' roster. That MobiTV's hoop team, now defunct, lost every game in the Emeryville league doesn't bode well for a career change. But Mikami, 36, isn't done with start-ups: he is diverting some of his earnings to create a winery within three years at his family's 15-acre vineyard of Zinfandel in Lodi, Calif. He's also taking viniculture classes at the University of California at Davis and planning a three-month sabbatical to get his hands dirty interning at a local winery. Again, it will be small and new: he envisions about 1,000 cases for his first vintage.