County firm are well connected. UK's ROK Building To IPO

Wouldn’t it be great if you could use your mobile phone as a TV, a DVD and an iPod? What if you could watch your home TV on it abroad — and make free calls? What if you could watch a race and place your bet on your phone, simultaneously? What if you could use it as a portable translator, and a “phone a friend” fact-checker?

ROK, founded by chairman and CEO Jonathan Kendrick just three and a half years ago, is in the business of making bright ideas reality and the company has proved to be a powerhouse of innovation.

It is now set for a stock market flotation. Its success has seen the company valued at $250 million following the sale of a number of shares to accredited investors. A stock market listing is planned for early next year, on Nasdaq in New York, which Jonathan describes as “the Rolls-Royce market for technology companies”.

The starting point for every ROK innovation, Jonathan explained, is the question: “Wouldn’t it be great if … ?”

The bronze sculpture of a flying pig adorning the ROK House boardroom embodies the occasional response from outsiders in the early days.

But when Jonathan poses the question to the team at ROK’s “skunkworks”, they come up with answers.

Explore

Jonathan explained the company’s research and development team are also given scope to explore their own ideas: “From here we come up with the ideas, but we also have guys who have a free hand to go off and see what they can do.”

Marketing director Bruce Renny said: “What I like about ROK, and what I like about Jonathan, is the ‘can do’ and ‘can do now’ attitude.”

He added: “We answer to ourselves, we don’t answer to anyone else. We have the freedom to explore the ‘What if … ?’ We have within ROK a carefully recruited pool of geniuses. We give our R&D team a free rein.”

Patenting of ROK’s intellectual property is key, to assure what Jonathan calls “unassailable IP”.

But in this commercially sensitive “skunkworks”, where technicians are working on groundbreaking new technology, how is secrecy maintained?

Jonathan explained: “From receptionists to top management, all our staff are shareholders. Everybody in the company is our partner, not just an employee — that creates a great bond of loyalty.”

ROK currently has 135 full-time employees, plus an extensive team of consultants, experts and designers.

Bruce said the company’s reputation has grown rapidly: “We’re all over the Web — and the word ‘innovation’ is always in the same sentence as ROK — or ‘irrepressible’!

“Particularly in the past year we’ve seen independent producers come to us. A lot of people are coming to us — we rather like that. We do have a number of products that we’ve partnered which we’ll roll out in the next year or so.”

Jonathan, an entrepreneur who has been in the mobile phone industry for more than a decade, sold his previous company to BT Cellnet, retaining the name ROK.

Bruce joined ROK at the end of 2002, after 10 years with Virgin. He said: “We literally had a blank sheet of paper.”

Bruce explained: “Jonathan spotted that real value lies in technology, and that content on mobile phones was going to be a massive global industry. He founded ROK as a technological innovator to develop the technology to allow it to work on mobile phones. He’s created an organisation unique in the world.”

Challenge

ROK has rapidly made its mark by mounting a significant challenge to 3G operators, making mobile TV available on mass-market 2.5G phones.

In independent tests, published this month, ROK TV was rated second only to Vodafone for its performance, proving that you do not need a 3G phone to enjoy mobile TV. ROK TV technology is now being licensed to networks and carriers worldwide.

ROK already has a deal to supply the technology for China’s first live mobile TV service. The deal involves China Mobile, the world’s largest mobile phone company, with 350 million subscribers and four million new customers added every month.

And there’s much more from ROK. With ROK Black Box, Bruce explained: “ROK are the first to crack the technology behind convergence, whereby we have converged in the Black Box the TV with the mobile phone via the internet.”

The set-top box “place-shifts” your home TV to your mobile phone via the internet — known as mobile IPTV (Internet Protocol Television). So even if you are abroad, there is no need to miss your favourite programme. Also, you can make mobile calls for free over the internet — mobile VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) — with no roaming charges. Bruce said: “We’ve all been stung by roaming charges, but this is going to change everything.”

Users just need to be within Bluetooth range of the internet, or in a WiFi zone. ROK Black Box will be available from High Street outlets from October.

ROK Star is another technological breakthrough by ROK. This provides live, simultaneous two-way streaming over GPRS and 3G. Applications for the technology are expected to include gaming, betting and voting. For example, you can watch racehorses circling the paddock, call up a screen overlay list of the runners, then press a button to place your bet.

This, Bruce explained, gives live interaction for the first time ever — with the star button on your mobile phone acting like the red button on your TV. With interactive TV shows expected to gather pace, he predicts we will soon see “made-for-mobile” programmes.

Jonathan said: “The technology is proven and we’re currently licensing it all around the world.”

ROK Media Store turns your mobile phone into an iPod. Songs are stored under compression on the mobile phone — and play back at the same quality as an iPOD.

As Bruce pointed out: “There are 50 million iPods in the world, but one billion mobile phone handsets are sold every year in the world.”

ROK Media Store launches in the USA this month, and in the UK in September.

Cool

Next month, ROK is launching two “very cool applications”, Bruce said. Text any question to ROK ANSA, and in 93 per cent of cases ROK’s database will give you the answer. If it can’t, the question is fired out to technicians in the US, the UK and Australia — the first to answer gets paid. ROK LOST (Language Over SMS Translation) is an instant mobile translation service incorporating 18 languages.

ROK Player, which turns your mobile phone into a DVD, is already up and running with 100 titles licensed to date, including Little Britain, Austin Powers and Sponge Bob. Just “plug and play” ROK Player memory cards into your mobile phone.

Jonathan said: “A smart mobile phone has more computing power than was in the Apollo 11. There are lots of things a mobile phone can do — and the consumer is now ready for it. One device does it all — that’s our mantra.

“Your mobile phone can be a DVD, a TV, even an iPod. We have no direct competitor: nobody else has done this as a whole. Mobile phone companies want a one-stop solution, and they can get it all from ROK in one go.”

Bruce added: “We set out to do the impossible — the flying pig if you like.

“Now we’re in Rio, Moscow, LA, Taiwan, Dubai, Karachi, China — and Albrighton. A lot of CEOs around the world now know where Shropshire is!”

(c) Shropshire Star