CEO Blog

We had a European managing directors meeting in Berlin this week, and a very good session it was. Between ending the first day and reaching a Bierkeller for supper we had a one hour walk around a few sites. We saw remaining parts of the Berlin Wall, lines where the Wall used to go, Checkpoint Charlie. Hard to pick out which is East and which is West Berlin nowadays. So, it made us think about the former political regime.
 
I remembered a joke told in the Soviet Union, which from only very dim memory, I think, was in an item written by someone called Vladimir Voinovich, but may have been in any number of places of course. If you're not careful its spirit can live on in companies.
 
In the former Soviet Union, a passer-by sees a workman digging holes, and each time he finished a hole, his colleague would then take the earth and fill the hole back in. Then they would move on, and ten yards later, repeat the strange process. "What are you doing?" asks the passer-by, "It’s very strange".
 
"Well," said the first workman, "Normally we are a three man team, but one of us is off sick today. My job is to dig holes, my colleague here puts the earth back in, but it is the job of our colleague to plant a tree in the hole but of course he is not here today’."
 
That is what I would call a 'zombie process'. It no longer has a point, but people show up to work and do it anyway. And, when you change companies, not everything changes in precisely the right way. To spare my blushes, and those of any current colleagues or former colleagues, I'll provide no examples. But, most companies carry on doing stuff that no longer needs doing. After a lot of change, it takes a while to find all the zombie activity and stop it happening.

'Checkpoint Charlie' image: Oh-Berlin.com used under Creative Commons license

There’s a strange debate going on in the world at the moment. People forget their history so easily, or don’t learn it in the first place. Unfortunately, this makes them naïve when it comes to understanding the world around them. And so the kinds of snapshot of the world we see today, can be misleading.

Profit is a great measure of customer satisfaction and company efficiency. It’s better than any amount of surveys.

So what if a whole company knocks itself out dreaming up new products, building them, marketing and selling them and supporting the guys at the front end? IF they don’t make a profit, they have not satisfied enough customers to the point where they are bringing in enough money, OR they have not run the resources of the company well enough. Usually, it’s both.

Now, I DO think there is such a thing as excessive profit…

Particularly, in companies that are totally divorced from their end customers, such as some of the financial institutions pre the great crash, but I would hesitate to say where that limit should lie.

Because the supposed pay off for capitalism is that you have the opportunity to make profit, but there exists a very real risk of making losses, even of losing everything.

And it’s a myth that a company can stand still. The reason we embarked on so much change at Psion, is if you do not get your company moving away from the cliffs you are sliding towards them whether you know it or not at the time. Not changing creates more risk than changing.

So think of profit as your customers voting everyday; of your team being effective everyday. This is the challenge for public sector organizations: they have to invent complex proxies for Profit. And, some of those measures work better than others. But it lacks the raw stimulus to action and change that making a loss can give a company. The all-important wake up call.

And profit builds the opportunity for more employment, better conditions for employees, more interest from investors, and more product investment. Without the profit incentive and focus, it’s impossible to run a business for even the medium term let alone the long term.

I was really pleased to speak at our UK Partner event on Wednesday. Hosted by John McMeeking, and produced by Marketing, it got some great feedback on the day and subsequently – ‘professional, ‘exciting’. Of some 75 people expected, there were only two ‘no shows’. But we did cheat you see. It was held in the British Telecom Tower courtesy of our Partners in BT via our friend Kim Gasson. Lunch was on the top floor, which revolves. On a great sunny day like last Wednesday, who would not want the chance to go up? Anyhow, here’s some stuff I learned…
 
Talecom has some fantastic driver behaviour software. Running on an EP10, it can save you 20 to 30% off your fuel bills by coaching the driver as you go. Jan, the Managing Director there, has saved up to 50% on one journey in his car although it’s really aimed at fleets, of course. Market for that? Pretty huge, AND it is easy to cost justify. Rolling out to other countries soon.
 
Then there's 'Lone Worker' applications. There are estimated to be some 4,000,000 workers in the UK - where personal worker risk and Regulatory company risk is potentially high. Andrew Parry of Connexion2 told us about that, and again…such a great case for it. Superb exploitation of the EP10 sensors as with driver behaviour, such as the EP10 sending an alert if there is a sudden drop of the device….through sudden illness or worse… Even I could sell that!
 
Blackroc’s positioning application for Workabout Pro and Omnii is really coming on. It's soon to be on the RT15. As Tony Jephcott said to me: "accurate positioning is addictive", and it's positioning down to only 1 cm, if you want it!. As positioning satellites grow from the twenties to nearer a hundred in the near future, the opportunities are huge. The application potential alone is GIGANTIC. And, squarely within the expertise of our partners, even if the application area is new. Tony wants you to sell it. The cost justifications are potentially EASY. Just get in touch, it blows your mind and is a great advert for our Open stance here at Psion.
 
Our customer Radian which runs a large housing association said a great thing too. "Our users wanted us to pick your product because it was the best looking". You said it Phil! We wanted it to be. It costs the same to have an ugly product as a great Psion looking product. Why not an iPad in this case? Because they BREAK. We know! Thank you for your support, Phil. Loads of other great conversations with the likes of Varlink, Bluestar, Airclic, Blackbay and B2M to name just a few – it was a very sociable event.
 
So…I learned a lot. Most important thing? Don’t sit next to Jan of Talecom at dinner. Your glass never gets empty…

The UK team just produced a video of some of the highlights, so thought I'd share:

We meet all our largest investors, and institutions that may be interested to invest, once or twice a year, normally. Sometimes, due to new faces or particular announcements, there will occasionally be other meetings with specific investors in between, but essentially it’s all about March and August/September.

For smaller individual shareholders, I have the occasional email to reply to, and we invite all small shareholders to our Annual General Meeting. Some 30 people come along, and the whole Board is available to talk to them before and after the event over a coffee. Some of them have strong or specific concerns, and they have our undivided attention at that point. However, the information we make public to all investors is the same, no matter who they are.

We have now visited most of the larger institutions, so here are the things on their mind.

They have been, on the whole, very supportive of the fact we had a lot of changes to make in the past three years. We had a few tough conversations after a disappointing first half last year, no question. But even then, they can see that the operational strategy has remained unchanged for so long, such that they can now share in our satisfaction at the strong second half performance.

We are still doing this: ‘Delivering more products, more quickly, through more channels and for less cost’. Remember, we have substantially delivered on the basics of being ‘Easy to do business with’. Though it’s obvious to our whole channel how much better we have got, I DO know from my own conversations with resellers, that this journey will never be finished.  But at the moment, the key action is about the ‘more products’ part. And we released a lot of new products over the past year. 

In the second half of last year, we grew 16% over the first half driven by new products. 30% of our fourth quarter revenues were from new products. This is a really good period of growth: and we grew into a weakening economy in second half. If I’m honest, I had hoped to do slightly better, but a number of expected sales just slipped out into the New Year due to nervousness about the economy.

That leads quickly to an area investors are very interested in: what are the market conditions right now? They like the new product story, but how about the market? So I tell them that while 8 weeks into the year is not a trend, so far the US is doing a little better than we expected, EMEA about what we thought with some uncertainty and longer decision cycles and Asia, possibly slightly slower. But…it’s eight to ten weeks, so it does not mean a lot. The KEY point is: overall the market is about what we set the company up for this year. Wish it was a bit better, but it’s what it is.

So how was this week’s car driver for Adrian and I?

Well, only one good story this time. He recently had to pick up an actress, known in the UK from TV and also some films, from an Awards ceremony: The BAFTAs. So they go from the awards to a London nightclub. He waits. The lady comes out with a gentleman friend at 3:30 in the morning. ‘Interestingly the lady and her friend seemed unaware I was in the car driving them….’ They dropped the gentleman off at his flat, and a few minutes later the actress said ‘please wait outside my flat, I want to get something and then take me to another club’. Two hours later, she has not reappeared and the driver went home by at 6:30 in the morning. She rang him two days later: she went in, sat down and had fallen instantly asleep. 

I haven’t posted since before Christmas because in the build up to the publication of our annual results, I’m more cautious about what I say. And a break is nice.

It works like this. The results were signed off late the evening before results day, then released at 7 o'clock the following day. At 0645, Adrian (our CFO) and I meet at our City PR Agency, then from 0700, we talk by phone to several analysts, who need to get a short note or briefing out to their colleagues or investors. There might be a few press calls too but these tend to get slotted in over the course of the day.

This time, we did a presentation at 1045 to a small group of analysts where they can ask more detailed questions. We managed a sausage sandwich first at ‘Piccolos’, an – ahem – ‘traditional’ British café nearby, just before the presentation, which is good for morale.

Then the work starts. From lunchtime onwards for a week, we host four or five meetings each day with investors and potential investors as well as broker sales teams. Each meeting takes about an hour, then after each meeting, a car meets us and drives us between 5 and 30 minutes to the next meeting. It’s a major logistical feat, and if you are late to one place, it’s hard to get the time back, so it’s a bit of a race. We can also make any calls from the car to check any information, facts, or get back to journalists.

Who are our big investors? Mainly, they are large, well-known pension funds or savings vehicles. So: our performance helps pay for pensions, basically. At some point during each day, an investor will have arranged lunch: the art here is to get Adrian to do the talking while I eat. He is less devious than me at this and so he loses weight over the week.

London Cabbies do something called ‘the knowledge’. Our driver, very friendly, had done something called ‘the ignorance’ whereby he would take routes heavily roadworked or clogged. I thought I could do better, Adrian is a Londoner these days and certainly could have. However, the driver strongly resembled a gentleman called ‘Oddjob’, formerly of some earlier James Bond movies (see the guy in the picture throwing his deadly top hat), so we did not offer any advice on route selection.

But this driver, as so often happens, was interesting to talk to. He recently drove a famous English footballer from London to another City. Despite his huge cost, it wasn't working out so well for this footballer and our driver asked him if he thought it ever would? The answer sadly was that ‘no, he didn’t.’ Be unfair to say who the footballer was, but any time you are in London, with a cabbie or other driver, it’s always worth asking who else they have driven. You always learn something interesting.

This time last year our driver pulled up when he saw two young men with unusual haircuts on the pavement in Mayfair. He wound his window down and shouted ‘Jedward!’.  These were a briefly very famous UK singing act (I don’t blame you if you have not heard of them in other countries!), he had been their driver a few weeks before. They showed their class in fact by coming over, shaking hands and being friendly. The gang of 20 girls with them came over too, and did not hide their disappointment when they saw who was in the back of the car after all. Perhaps they were expecting Simon Cowell?

Anyhow, next post maybe I’ll probably talk about what the investors are interested in at the moment when it comes to Psion: this can be informative and pretty important.

In October 2010, Psion launched Omnii based on our unique open innovation strategy.

Omnii gives our customers a highly adaptable and easy to customise solution with tangible benefits in total cost of ownership. It forms the foundation for our future products and gives us real competitive edge. In frequent discussions with our partners around the world, I’ve been told time and again how Omnii is opening up new business opportunities.

The unique Omnii Advantage programme helps drive those opportunities – the ability to repurpose a device through a field upgrade... But, Mike Doyle, our CTO, says it a lot better below....

Thanks John.

This week, we unveiled the Omnii XT15, the second generation Omnii handheld aimed at the supply chain and logistics marketplace. In our marketing, you’ll see it described as the ‘ultimate supply chain handheld solution’, and it truly is something special. It builds on the core strengths of the XT10 while bringing significant additional benefits.

We’ve built a product that is more durable and rugged – meeting the requirements of both IP65 and IP67 certification. This is a first for us, and we believe, our industry as a whole.

With the smart technologies integrated into the device, we’ve also pushed battery life to an incredible 20 hours of use.

We’ve added next generation 802.11n wireless technology, more data capture and a range of keypad options. Plus, to support a whole new breed of current and future business applications, we’ve added a wide range of sensors.

So a great new product that adds significantly to our SCL portfolio, brings next generation wireless, and delivers even more on the full promise of the Omnii platform.

Over the coming weeks, you will see a concerted effort to realise this promise through a carefully orchestrated programme of Psion and partner Marketing activity.

Please give the Omnii XT15 and all the associated campaigns, your full support. I’d also very much appreciate it if you shared your feedback with me directly via email or, of course, via this community.

Mike

We had about 50 of our partners in Miami last week. While it may sound glamorous, when I say ‘Miami’, it was ‘near’ Miami. A 45 minute drive from the airport. 

Things did not start well: we ended up driving under a large flock of vultures, which is always a bit unnerving. Our hotel was located in a modest area, and only the most dedicated partners made the necessary journey to a more 'exciting' and vibrant area for some late night drinks. That said, the planned 08:15 start time on the first day turned into 08:25, and more like 08:40 on the second day.

It was, nonetheless, a genuine pleasure to mix with people from Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Uruguay, Panama, Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Honduras, Costa Rica, Nicaragua…. As usual, I'm sure I missed a few. Oh, and the US and Canada of course.

Only two people fell asleep during my presentation (you know who you are…) which given everyone is travelling is not a bad number - 4% of the audience. When it gets nearer to 10%, you know you are in trouble.

This strong turnout demonstrated the real value of our partner community. Every country has its own level of progress when it comes to mobilizing applications, so the needs of niches and customers are different. A vendor like Psion cannot hope to be the expert and to maintain a close customer relationship in such a diverse region. In addition, there is continual change and difference between each country’s legal, taxation, import and regulatory regimes. Then there's culture. Taken together, these things continually create opportunities and shut them down. Again, the vendor cannot be the expert in every single country with which it deals.

Our partners businesses' live and die by their customers and the service they give to them, so normally you get an unbiased view of the market and its needs. Did you know Brazil's GDP went very fractionally down last quarter? That’s pretty rare in the so called BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries in recent years, though it looks temporary.

This event was a real chance to ask people in all the Latin American countries what they are seeing in their economies and get some real 'colour'. Unlike with partners, when you ask your own internal teams on the payroll what the economy is like, you can get some ‘groupthink’ of like minded colleagues and convince yourselves to be over pessimistic or overoptimistic.  A reseller tends to be his or her own economist.

Of course, the world is currently concerned about the Euro and our partners were no different. There were hardly any partners that did not ask what I thought and as you know, I am always happy to give my opinion on that one… So pinning my colours to the mast, I think that there's too much political will to let it fail for some time yet, and there's too much democracy to get it fixed for some time too. So continued uncertainty. But like I said in my speech, predictions, especially about the future, are often wrong.

A big ‘thank you’ to all our friends in South America for working with us and for coming to our conference.

On my trip back to the airport in Florida this week, I found myself in the car of a former Boston police officer who'd spent significant chunks of his career in the 70s undercover. He told me a few stories. One was about him spending an entire month undercover to bring a drugs gang to justice. When it came to leading the final raid on the house to find the evidence, there appeared to be no illegal drugs. Until, in frustration, he punched a nearby wall. His fist went through the wall revealing a secret room containing the drugs he was seeking.

He also told me about a memorable experience in 1976, when HRH The Queen, was on a visit to Boston as part of the American Bicentenary celebrations. My driver was part of the plainclothes detail guarding her. Strict instructions were given as to protocol with the Queen. "You bow, and you call her Your Majesty". And remember, 35 years ago such things were much more formal than they are today.

Anyway, after a formal reception, the guests all left and the plainclothes police team were stood down and helping themselves to the last of the buffet. My driver, with caviar toast in one hand and a glass of Champagne in the other (and why not?!) turns round JUST as the Queen is coming round the corner accompanied by the Mayor of Boston and almost bumps into him. 

Being caught completely unwares, he forgets his protocols and manages to blurt out: "How ya doing, your excellency?" with a complete absence of bow. I'm guessing that the Queen's not used to such informality because she just laughs and carries on her walk, completely unflustered, accompanied by a slightly more flustered, Mayor of Boston. Meanwhile, in clearly not so unforgiving a mood, the Mayor glares at the policeman.

Not sure the Queen reads this blog, but on the off chance she does, perhaps she can tell us if she recalls that incident in Boston all those years ago? 

I had a rare social outing recently, meeting with people that in the main were also running companies and where a couple of people had a good sales pedigree; better than mine.

One of the stories they told was back in the 1980s, in a London sales office, where someone was trying to sell a room-sized superfast laser printer called a 3800 (costing, let's say, 500K USD back then).

Quite sensibly, the then salesperson took his prospective customer, which happened to be London's Metropolitan Police, into the 'printer room' to demonstrate this printer working in a real situation.

In common with my current printers at home, back then, paper jams were a frustrating fact of life. And, with a big printer doing hundreds of pages an hour (I imagine), this was a crucial issue. You didn't want it to be as demanding as your car when it comes to maintenance. So, the salesman opened it up to show how easy it was to clear paper jams and blockages. A colleague walked in and said: "Oh, has the b****y thing broken down again ???!!"; perhaps NOT realising this was a sales situation.

Anyhow, the sales guy got the order as the Met Police declared it the "funniest demo they'd ever been to".

Note to our sales teams: don’t try this technique till the New Year. OK?

It’s the time of year when our sales teams are working their socks off to bring in orders against the backdrop of a weaker economic climate than we had originally expected, and our supply chain and operations teams are at full stretch fulfilling the orders. It’s not necessarily fun. Year-end stretches every bit of energy and creativity when a business is trying to hit targets.

Years ago, I was running a sales team in a value added reseller (VAR). A member of the sales team was told verbally by the IS Director of one of the world's then largest banks that we had lost the order...to the vendor of the same equipment we were selling. At that point, it became personal not business.

It was a 400KUSD order with more to follow. I had not met the customer myself, but time was of the essence, we had been told verbally we’d lost, but there was a chance that the Purchase Order to the winner had not yet been physically raised.

I figured that if I rang to ask for a meeting, the customer might say no, or I might get his Personal Assistant and not get through. So, I thought ok, important guy, bet he gets in by 8:00 in the morning or before. The PA might get in, I thought, more like 8:30 or 9:00.  And, I decided to just show up in the reception at the bank with no appointment.

I wanted to time it to get to this bank's HQ before 8:00. That meant getting up at 5 in the morning, getting ready, walking through a wood in the dark, so I could get a 6 o’clock train. Waterloo Station for 7 o’clock, allow 30 minutes to get to the Bank in the City of London, and a bit of contingency left over.

Anyway, I enter the bank reception at 7:45, and ask the security guards if I can see the IS Director. Ten minutes later he comes out of the elevator, looking confused. I ask him for 15 minutes of his time so I can explain why he does not have all the information he needs to make his decision, and he offers me a coffee up in his office.

I explained how the vendor of the equipment did not actually want his business, but we DID want it. We shook hands on the deal within an hour, and got a purchase order by fax at the end of that day.

So yes, high risk, and a bit of adrenaline involved, but it worked. I won't trouble you with what happened the second time I tried the same approach. Let's just say it doesn't always work!

As you know, Chicago is known as the windy city. And guess what…it was well, windy.

I had some great meetings with our team and resellers, more of which another day. I’m typing this in the airport, Chicago O’Hare, and reflecting on the wide variety of customer service experiences I've had this week.

At the airport, I had charming greetings from the lady doing check in. But security could have given lessons to Twitter. Twitter – those guys are like War and Peace with their ridiculous 140 characters. Do they ever stop talking?

Security at O'Hare could bring out a product called ‘T’. Here you get a maximum of 7 characters, not 140. Seven different people combined in such a way that not one of them spoke more than one word at a time to me. Those words were ‘ok’, ‘here’, ‘shoes’ belt’, ‘push’ ‘forward’ and two blanks, i.e. no words. And one other ‘ok’. Alright, I forgot, one of them said ‘face that way’. Wow, I bet his colleagues say ‘don’t get trapped in a lift with HIM, he just talks and talks.’ Er…except that’s too many words…

Anyhow, WOW! I went to a Japanese restaurant called Kiku near Chicago with a partner of ours. They cook on a large steel surface at your table. The service and food was fantastic. We applauded the chef several times for the sheer artistry of how he dealt with the food, it’s a show in itself. And as for the egg juggling for the egg fried rice…at one point the egg was thrown in the air in its shell, it landed on the side of the chef’s machete, the shell cracked open and stayed on the edge of the machete while the egg contents shot through onto the hot range. I want to go again. I gotta practice that move with the eggs, or get Mrs. Conoley to learn how to do it.

Most years, the Psion Board of Directors visit our key facility in Mississauga, home of most of our internal R and D, development and operations amongst other things.

A couple of weeks ago, we had that pleasure of welcoming the Board to Mississauga. I have observed a few of these go wrong in other companies in my time. However, it is a great opportunity for the Board to connect closely with a wide range of people, issues and activities, in a way not possible in the more standard, dry Board meeting.

Actually there are certainly ‘drier’ Boards than that of Psion, but you know what I mean. Even so, there is a certain tension while people try not to put too many feet wrong.  That said, we nearly managed to make it go wrong in a funny way for me.

We had a short presentation to all colleagues at the Mississauga site. We have a large entrance area where people can cluster without TOO much discomfort for a short talk, and the plan was for me to go first for ten minutes, then our Chairman for two or three. No charts, just PA system and microphone. I think right: new products, quality, financial chase to year-end, and making sure supply chain works to fulfill orders. Then the Chairman says his bit, which I expected to be re-emphasizing financial performance plus shareholder expectations.

So the crowd is all gathered, we are at the top of the stairs about to start, and the Chairman says: "Tell you what, I’ll go first".  No problem. Except he talked for ten minutes about… well, new products, quality, financial chase to year-end, and making sure supply chain works to fulfill orders.

So if I looked a little strange to the audience, well that’s what happens when you rewrite your speech in your head while standing in front of 150 people...

Anyhow, what about Board content? Overall strategy is unchanged, but the emphasis is clearly on commercializing what we have done and being focused in order to deliver results. The big word, ‘focus’.

I’ve observed some funny things over the years when Boards have come into contact with the companies they ‘run’. One thing that had me chuckling for months afterwards happened when I was a Pre-Sales Engineer at IBM in the late 80s. We were working for a global confectionery firm. You’ve eaten their stuff, and liked it, trust me, so the name would be a recognisable one.

The two head people visited their UK operation for the first time in a while and it happened to be at a time when the UK tax system made it attractive for companies to offer their staff a company car benefit. But it was a distorting tax measure and encouraged nice cars indeed. In fact, the benefits system in the UK offshoot of this global company, further distorted the global scheme. This meant that large numbers of cars in the car park were of the highest calibre: sports cars, such as Porsches, were very popular alongside other ‘famous’ luxury cars most of us don’t drive. A good 50 or more were always to be found outside the company building.

Sadly, the Board members of that famous company had modest tastes themselves, and upon arrival at the UK HQ, were very surprised by the luxurious nature of the cars in the car park. A major explosion and total sense of humour loss ensued, heated discussion with the local UK management, especially as (I heard) that each Board member drove ordinary family saloon cars. These weren’t extreme socialists, far from it, but they did not like such opulence on display amongst colleagues.

Within three months, the cars in the car park had totally changed and it really did hurt a lot of people who had got used to having a great car. As they say, the Board of that company now got what “it had inspected, and not what it expected”. But I had to laugh.

Our own Board visited our key Mississauga facility near Toronto at the end of last month and it was nothing like the story above. It was also not without its humorous moments; something I will share in a future blog.

I was going to write about our Board visit to Mississauga this week, but that can wait just a little longer.

My one thought amongst the blizzard of sincere respect towards this man is this. His breakthrough was surely seeing the potential of designing products for the user and not just for the task to be completed. Ergonomics are vital in our own industry today. Maybe without Steve Jobs our products would still run on DOS, be twice the size and weight, but be unbreakable. But would they be usable? Let’s just say, they'd be less so than today.

Here's a good story about rugged versus consumer devices from our Central/Eastern Europe Partner Conference. About 90 of our partners attended from a large range of countries. I talked to partners from Poland, Russia, Serbia, Romania, Montenegro, Turkey and Croatia. It was reassuring to find the mind-altering capabilities of Vodka remained unchanged since my youth, but these days I made sure I was back in bed before midnight. What an entrepreneurial bunch though, and good company.

We had an excellent talk from a Polish customer who is kindly taking many of our new EP10s this year. But here’s just one insight (of several) from him as to how he came to decide to select a rugged device. If this gentleman reads this, my apologies for the usual inaccuracies including spelling from me, but as you said: ‘It's your story now’.

They already used a routing and delivery application in their lorries, running on smart phones. So he approached a lorry cab and called up "Hey Zbigniew! Can you show me how you use the application?". So the lorry driver comes down, and calls out: "Hey Tomas," and down comes the driver’s 14 year old grandson. The grandson goes on to demonstrate the device.

Many drivers used to take kids with them on journeys because the device and its buttons were too small for their larger fingers and the display was not bright enough for middle aged eyes. When I used to work in warehouses or on building sites, I also found my fingers would not be as sensitive and precise as when I am just sitting at a desk, and all together the specific ergonomic issues point towards a specialist rugged or durable device.  The EP10 has a great display by the way...

Smartphone type technology has its place for ad-hoc use, especially in white collar type environments. Where the use is in a realtime environment, where lack of precision and error is costly, or where productivity applications meet manual or mechanical work,  it requires a specialised device from ourselves or the others in our industry. Smartphones are also useful to us in piloting applications, proving the value, and then investing in the real technology – because our technology has a better Total Cost of Ownership than a smart or mobile phone.

Update: We took some time out of the agenda to have a bit of fun. You can view the results here:

Singapore seems to me a great invention. I have been twice, briefly. But I have seen occasional references to a comment on an invention we take for granted, by a gentleman from Singapore who is reasonably well known in  the Western world, but more so in Asia. Lee Kwan Yew the former Prime Minister of Singapore said he believed air conditioning was the greatest invention ever. Both he, and air conditioning itself, have detractors. However, he took Singapore from being an obscure dot on the map in the 1960s to a widely respected participant and leader in the modern world. Quite an invention in effect.

Psion invented the PDA many years ago, but that is not remembered today, even by some in Psion. Our new EP10 PDA comes out of our heritage and is a leader in functionality and price. We did a great job in bringing that to market. Our Omnii is fantastic too.

But why air conditioning? I landed at an airport in Texas once. In summer. Over 100 degrees and humid, and normal for that area of course. The senior person I was with had booked a hire car and demonstrated how to confuse a Texan. ‘Has the car got air conditioning?’ said my colleague. ‘Sir, is there any other kind of car?’ said a baffled Texan.

So, apart from the fact it permeates so much human activity, Lee Kwan Yew’s point was that air conditioning is what enabled modern business to be done in the Asia. How else to sustain the mental concentration required for education, research and modern commerce in the heat of the day?

Anyhow, if we at Psion can use the Open Innovation philosophy to find the next ‘air conditioning’ it would be a worthy journey.

Bit of food for thought here as we get more into our modular world at Psion.

My family stopped in Germany for a couple of days in August. For people familiar with the area, we stayed at Titisee in the Schwarzwald (Black Forest). A highlight was going up the Feldberg mountain. Small mountain, but a perfect, 360 degree panoramic view as far as Mont Blanc in the Alps, 240 kilometres away.

My wife has always wanted to buy a traditional carved Nativity scene for Christmas decoration, which is a traditional craft of the region, even though we know they could be expensive. The idea is you have a wooden stable and the various biblical figures associated with Jesus’ birth that you place in the scene. Very Christmassy. Anyhow, stay with me here.

Well, we entered the little shop, smelling of the wood that had been worked on in the workshop - very evocative for me. How pleasing to see a wooden stable, about two feet long, and costing just one hundred euros. WOW, so much cheaper than we expected.

And then the penny (or should I say euro cent) dropped: I just had not expected such a clever commercial model to be used in this quaint shop. It's the one we have all seen with cars and so on. The stable is cheap. But each figure is very expensive, 40 to 80 euros and that’s where the massive profit is. But, once you have the stable in a certain style, and the first few figures in the same style, you can only buy more in that style from this shop or it won’t look right. So each year, if you have a budget, you can add a couple of figures till you have a really good set. Wise men, Mary, Joseph; even down to a donkey, hens, a well, lamb… Beautiful scene yes, but also a recurring revenue stream at a very high margin.

I told my wife that could be her early Christmas present as it turned into a lot of money. She didn't reply.

I heard a couple of comments over the summer that made me think I need to restate what open source mobility (OSM) means to us, partners and customers.

Right up front, can I be clear that no one will buy one more unit from us than before because of OSM. It’s the BENEFITS they buy and the products they buy. OSM is just the feature if you like, benefits are what sells. We use OSM to explain to people the importance of modularity, customisation, and open innovation - best represented currently by this site, IngenuityWorking.com.

OSM is our strategy and represents a change to our business model. Eighteen months ago, I said two key things to internal, then later, external audiences.

First, that OSM would gradually sink into the infrastructure and in time we would rarely talk about it as it would permeate most of what we do, but we WOULD talk about its effects as they came through. Second, I said many efficiency benefits would come through over a year or two, but that the full array of external benefits would emerge over several years.

What are the effects of OSM so far? Faster product development meaning more current products in the market than before (still not as fast as we will be, or some of you would like us to be now). Our revenues should now increase as expected, especially from the US. Our speed and ease of manufacturing and serviceability is greatly improved, which is better for cash flow. Quality has also been driven up on new products compared to historic or industry performance.

Part of the strategy is this site, IngenuityWorking.com, which has led to unparalleled access to data, information, conversations and ideas and is unique in the industry - and almost across the world. There are two areas we have begun on but which will only start to become more obvious and better understood over the next six months to a year (by us AND the market). These are the facts that our modular products have the best Total Cost of Ownership in the market, and secondly the ability for both Psion and third parties to customize the Omnii product (the ‘open innovation’ side). We have shown little in these two areas of late but it's coming.

We have seen orders grow on the back of new products, now the revenues should grow. That effect is partly about the ‘features’ of OSM, but also the benefits to customers and partners which will expand upon it. It's features and benefits we will be talking about, not ‘features’ and OSM.

I would not expect to have much to say about barcodes, but it’s funny who you see around the place in the holiday period. As you will know there has been some recreational rioting in the UK of late. Some very bad people, and lots of very stupid people. Sometimes disadvantaged, but often stupid.
 
So a gentleman caught my eye while at the shops due to the fact that he, well, looked like he would be at home in a riot. Yes I know that’s prejudiced, he may be very nice. However, he had chosen to have a large barcode tattooed on the back of his neck, offset by his nearly shaven head. I would just say that would not place him at the ‘genius’ end of intelligence, ok?
 
So why did he do it? Was he rioting, and saw lots of barcodes, and think ‘that’s a good look I’ll get one on my neck’?. Could it be that he went to a Tattoo artist who was hard of hearing, and asked for I don’t know some fearsome creature like a ‘barracuda’, but that the tattoo artist misheard it as ‘barcode’?. And maybe, being on the back of his neck he cannot see it and does not realize it’s in fact a barcode? And his friends have not told him because they think it’s a word in Mongolian or something?
 
Or it’s maybe me. It may indeed be cool and I don’t know it. However, when the barcode was invented they sure did not expect it to go there.

There is a modern fad to use Ernest Shackleton as a model for modern business leaders. Well, actually today we have very little in common with such a man. He led an Antarctic Expedition in the early 20^th Century, and the ship and some 30 men became stuck in ice. The ship was crushed, and they were absent for some two years. He led a small group off to get help, hundreds of miles through icy seas and with a final arduous, icy trek to a settlement in the South Atlantic. Well...

There was an exhibition in a museum about him which I found while I was on a few days holiday but one thing did strike me. When he led a small party off from the main body to get help, his big concern was NOT the make up of the small team that was to go off and seek help. His concern was the make up of the team who would spend many months waiting and hoping for rescue but not knowing if it would come.

Anyhow, he chose to take two of his most negative men in the small team with him, so they could not stay behind and poison the attitudes and sanity of the large group remaining. These two were capable men: but unable to see the effect of their attitudes on the morale of the rest, Shackleton could not risk leaving them behind. Big call.

As usual, all facts above may be slightly wrong, I did go to the pub afterwards.

Wherever you are in the world, you will have seen that there has been rioting in the UK this past week and the newspapers have been full of sad and awful, as well as inspiring stories. And there has been little in between.

Psion missed its market expectations in the first half of this year, and despite expressions of disappointment, we had some positive comments and articles - well, most of the time. There was one paragraph about me titled 'Hero and Zero' in one newspaper. I assume the usual headline writer was on holiday for that unoriginal one, but suffice to say I was NOT the hero in that paragraph.

But there were a lot of heroes in London and elsewhere this past week, no question. One aspect not commented on also does sadden me, to take a different view, that is many people have been apprehended and we now need a new crime of ‘complete stupidity’. Some people really do seem to be going to jail for the crime of riot, violence and criminal stupidity.

Suffice it to say bookstores acted to the rioters, as a crucifix acts to vampires. One of the awards for best commercial response to the riots was a UK book chain called Waterstones who, at the height of the riots, used words to the effect of: "We'll probably stay open, after all, if they do break in and steal our books, they might learn something".

Trying to tear a television screen off the wall of a Betting shop when a TV shop is opposite is pretty dumb. Dumber is putting photographs of yourself committing crime on social media sites. Knuckledraggingly stupid is getting filmed merely stealing crisp packets and stuffing them in your clothing –

Too hungry to steal something valuable? Too busy?

As for taking your kids for a quick riot and loot, but stopping to find the right size of trainers… priceless. The mind truly boggles.

Frankly, some of them are probably unaware that trainers can also be used for EXERCISE not fashion. You could tell them but they would not believe, or for that matter, understand you.

Anyhow, I don’t make light of it, but I’m prouder to be British today than a week ago for people’s reaction in adversity.

…you can’t get away.

I had a ’workation’ with family (i.e. holiday destination with broadband).

I need to be non-specific to avoid offense, but it’s a place we've been to a few times before. A former fishing village, it's adjacent to a network of bays, estuaries, cliffs, beaches and former ports. This area takes a long time to go round by car, so a network of mainly passenger ferries links various combinations of routes. Ferries can take from 12 people up to 80, depending on route, and some are pretty humble vessels. Tickets are normally bought from a ticket office or booth on various quays.

Anyway, this year, back in February, the rugged handheld terminal made its appearance on all the boats and at the ticket booths. Not an attractive looking device, longer and uglier than a Psion WAP. You can buy a bulk ticket with an RFID circuit inside that gives you a set number of credits, you get on a boat, and either the captain or an assistant will read your ticket and debit some of your credits each time you take a trip. Pretty clever, right?

Except on one boat the terminal could not read my ticket, there were 7 of us so it was maybe 50 euros that day. In the end, I said I’d go to the ticket booth when I landed and pay. It’s the sort of area you can do that and be trusted. So I went in on landing, the person in the booth spent several minutes trying to bring up the right application for the route I had just taken. They could not access the right part of the application to charge me, and asked if I could come back tomorrow!

Well that was fine except the person the next day could not make the terminal work either.

I tried one more time the day after that, and someone more expert managed to debit my ticket with the right amount.

So the ‘reading’ of the ticket tag was erratic, the application is hard to use for staff and the staff weren’t fully trained. FOUR months after bringing the system into service. This was leading to delays on the smaller boats, and some people must surely have given up unlike me and in the end, not paid.

The moral of the story? Real-time processes even in holiday destinations is about the people and the implementation, NOT just the standalone hardware device.

For those of you that don't know yet, we have a major scandal happening in the UK media scene that is also now getting coverage in other countries. It’s all over the TV and press, as you'd expect. However, I saw someone I used to know commenting on it, who once was a competitor, and who now has a higher position in public life in the UK.

Anyway, many years ago, he told me he had employed an engineer once and found his behaviour very strange. Now I was interested as I recognised the name, it was someone I'd also interviewed but in the end did not offer a job to. He seemed okay, competent, I can’t remember why I didn't make him an offer. But here’s why I got lucky (and here's where I won’t go into the mistakes I have made hiring people!).

So the story goes, this engineer never seemed to be where he was supposed to be. He was hard to get hold of on the phone and his excuses were complicated. Overall his behaviour was SO strange, that when my friend and competitor saw this guy in his car one day he followed him for while. He saw the man pull up into the car park of a large Japanese electronics company. And then he saw him walk in showing an ID badge to reception.

So after a minute, my competitor friend went and asked if this man worked there and was told, ‘Yes!’ The engineer had TWO full-time jobs. He was fired by phone soon afterwards. The next day, he came to the competitor's office with his lawyer!!

With that much sheer nerve and drive he no doubt had the skill to succeed by just playing it straight. Why be a liar and cheat? What a waste. 

Actually, there is just no link I can think of whatsoever here, however, in the spirit of light relief from a hard week in business, I thought I'd share a bit of local celebrity news.

Our London office is in the West End - just round the corner from Leicester Square - where the world premiere is taking place. If there's any kind of link, it's that JK Rowling used to live in a village not so far from where I was brought up around the border of England and Wales. If you know the family in the books, ‘the Dursleys’, well Dursley is a biggish village in that area too, in Gloucestershire.

So right about now the premiere is about to start. There is a huge stage set up in Trafalgar Square with immense posters from the film and what looks like thousands of people waiting for the cast to arrive. It looks like there is a red carpet all the way up from Trafalgar Square to Leicester Square, and I guess the actors from the film will be walking along it and talking to the crowds. The area is rammed with people, you can hardly move around in the streets in the area. It's been raining in a ‘biblical’ fashion almost, heavy flooding rain, adding to the drama. No one seems to mind though. (Late update: it's just stopped raining, which is good news for the fans and the torches burning across Trafalgar Square).

Anyhow, back to work for me, but reckon I might try and go and see the film at the weekend. Just to keep my children company. Wonder if David P will watch it....OK, well a small link then.

A couple of weeks ago an organization called Creative Barcode asked me to give a talk on Open Innovation. The venue was really interesting, the University Women’s Club in London behind Park Lane. Fantastic old building with Victorian style interiors. The Womens’ Club was founded in 1883, and there was no doubt some shock when a ‘Smoking Room’ was opened there a few years later. In the UK these days, there would be even MORE shock if you tried opening a smoking room. Forward to the past.

Anyhow, Creative Barcode are interesting. They have found a way to help protect people’s design ideas in a digital world, to avoid people stealing ideas and not giving credit to the inventor. And on that mission, they are meeting and attracting a lot of interesting people from the Design and the Open Innovation worlds.

The VP for Open Innovation from Unilever (huge company) told us all about OI and their goals. Very interesting. In terms of the contacts that were exchanged though, a number of possible opportunities came up in various directions.  An aspect of Open Innovation that I think must be pretty normal in fact.

Now a conversation or an idea is a long way from something we might actually do anything with; however, over coffee and a couple of email follow ups (and blurring the facts here in case of embarrassment)

• Someone designing a handheld unit for a particular purpose, where it was data sensing and capture that was the core requirement. Well, modularity could be the answer there to speed up time to market and meeting is forthcoming.
• Small sensing item for the consumer world in partnership with a large corporate - meeting forthcoming.
• Discussion about using social media to transform the culture, morale and efficiency of an airport
• Strong interest in a beekeeping application I saw a tweet about once on IW
• An introduction to a director in the Renewable energy field.

The Unilever guy was interesting. They clearly had a ‘the CEOs gone crazy’ moment (I’m guessing) when the CEO laid out some immense ‘sustainable, yet profitable’ goals, and the progress on real issues like clean water, hygiene and sustainable production certainly impressed me.

Me, I’m more modest: I want to get back to pre-recession order levels and profits quickly. Then the world. Second half onwards is what it's all about. Then I might do more networking. It gets me out.