Here you go folks, Matt Westover’s final post from inside CES 2008!  It was a great week for MoGo and thanks for following it through the days!!

The Harsh Realities of…The Morning After CES

Where are all the camera’s?  Where are the producers? What happened to my limo?    Uh-O, CES is over and it is back to reality.

Reality started for me at about 1am Friday morning when I landed back in Boston.  My limo had morphed into a dirty cab taking me home.  Upon exiting the cab at the corner near my house, I accidentally hit the door handle getting out of the car and knocked my Blackberry out of my hand and onto the wet ground outside the car.  This would not have been the end of the world until I realized the cab was parked over a city drain and my Blackberry bounced off the grate and fell perfectly through one of the holes and splashed in the drain water below.  The screen light was on so I could clearly see my bberry sinking down and into the pipe with the rain water.  In one second, my phone and my database was gone. Yes it was gone forever.  How did I react?  It was an irreversible occurrence and had to get over it and figure it out in the morning.

The 6am wakeup call came very quickly and the day was going to be a busy one.  Once the kids were fed and off to school I was staring at a 9 foot Christmas tree in the middle of our living room that needed to be sent out with the trash.  Whoa, I just went from summer weather in the “anything goes” city of Las Vegas to rainy cold weather in Boston staring at a Christmas tree that needed to be cut in pieces and thrown out.  Clearly, I was back to reality.  Grabbing a power tool, I cut the branches off the tree and took it all out for trash.  One action item down; many to go.

Now, I was chomping at the bit to get to the cell phone store the moment it opened. Without my phone and email, I was out of contact with our MoGo team and had to get connected again.  The store was open and my replacement phone was in stock.  Now the challenge was restoring my database; if I could get it back at all.   After 20 years in the backup segment of the market, I had a backup of my bberry database and could quickly back off the proverbial “edge of the bridge” as the day was looking up at that point.

Now I could get back to work.  Or so I thought…..  It turns out I had to take our dog to the vet as it was one of my roles I agreed to when we bought the dog.  After a couple of hours and a little medication, our dog was back in action and I now I was back to work.  What happened to my life of luxury I had the day before?  It may not have been reality but it was much easier than this juggling act I was going through today!  And who needs reality anyway?

Ah, there is the twist.  Reality may have very wide or very narrow swings of its pendulum. It is for each one of us to manage the adversity reality can place in front of us at any moments notice.  This week of CES was all real and the pendulum swung broadly from the highs to the lows and it was up to our MoGo team and me to manage ourselves through it and drive the company ball down the field in 2008.

All the best athletes, doctor’s, teachers, business professionals (the list goes on) have setbacks and difficult times in their journey to success.  None have an easy ride and a straight road to success. What made them the best and what defined their character is how they responded to adversity and how they stood back up on their feet, dusted themselves off and kept competing.  A champion is made in the difficult times and recognized as such later.  A champion prepares tirelessly without the camera watching and executes with unwavering focus when the camera’s are rolling!

Though everyone wants to be a champion; few are preparing themselves to overcome their own or their company’s own challenges/setbacks to become a champion!

Now that the bright lights of the camera’s are gone and the limo’s aren’t here, it is our time to prepare/execute for the year and come back to CES in 2009 and beat our past performances!  Yes, as it turns out, we are our own competition and if we worry about ourselves and stay focused to our game plan, we can surpass our CES success of 2008.

Today’s reality was challenging; I will make tomorrow’s reality better!

Matt

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Can I just say how lucky we are to have a head honcho like Matt Westover? It is truly amazing to have the man in charge be so open, so vocal and so, well, cool. Here’s more from him inside CES 2008!

Day 4 at CES started quickly as we were very fortunate to be on Donny Deutsch’s “The Big Idea” last night and the excitement and interest in MoGo from the CNBC show kept us out later than usual seizing the moment! Though CES was winding down our phones were ringing off the hook for last minute meetings before everyone flew out of town. Many of our current partners watched the segment and thankfully, are proudly associated with us. They all expressed their enthusiasm to make 2008 an even bigger year with us than our record sales year of 2007! We will take all the sales we can as we are focused on making 2008 our breakout year; our “Crossing the Chasm” moment, if you have read the book. 2008 will not be the year we follow the “4- Hour Workweek” by Tim Ferris. I have asked Tim for a little help as my weeks are now standing at 4+ 80 hours….. so I am failing his course.

The first year we attended CES with our new company and only a few handmade MoGo’s we were there test marketing our messaging and positioning of the MoGo. It would not be formally released into the market until later in 2006. We hit the jackpot and were lucky enough to find the right person at NBC and were 1 of 4 products they profiled live on the “NBC Today Show” live from the CES show floor! We did not even have a company booth there! Stating the obvious, that was a good first CES for us. Last year we introduced our next generation MoGo’s at CES and won the “Best of CES” award! We beat our billion dollar competitors. Again, we viewed our second year an overwhelming success. And now, this year we are fortunate enough to participate in “The Road to CES” series underwritten by American Express and produced by CNBC and Donny Deutsch’s “The Big Idea” ! One of Donny’s show experts for the series, Dr. Doug has blogged very favorably about MoGo (http://www.cnbc.com/id/22579768/site/14081545/page/2/ ) and we thank him for his support. We are fortunate to have the best blogging about us. See our blog at http://www.mogomobility.com/.

We are 3 for 3 at CES and we now have 1 year to outdo ourselves at CES 2009. Donny and team, help!! We will definitely be using the commercial Deutsch Inc. produced for us, as it is excellent! Have you seen it?

So now the MoGo team has mounds of business cards and actions items ahead of us from this week. Though we had a blast promoting MoGo’s until we dropped each day and are exhausted from the week, our work has only begun. We must follow up and capture the business momentum from this year’s show!

I leave the show wondering how I can show my appreciation for what all the wonderful people producing and working behind the scenes at “The Big Idea” did for MoGo and our team? The awareness and branding they generated for the MoGo is simply something we could have never accomplished on our own. We must find a way to return the favor to them! Remembering what my parents taught me— “it is better to give than receive” and we will be receiving the benefits of this CES experience for months! So I leave today with the difficult action item figuring out how we could possibly give back to them, anything near what we are receiving……………

Gratefully,

Matt

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Wow how did I NOT see this gem before now?!  This gem I’m referring to, is an absolutely awesome article I Just found called “Meet Matt Westover - The Man Behind The MoGo Mouse.”  Basically the article does just that, it allows all of You, to meet Matt, who truly is the man behind the MoGo Mouse.

Head over and check it out, watch the embedded video they provided and learn a whole slew of info about not only Matt, but this great company in general.  The article sums it up pretty sweetly:

“The vision that Matt and the folks at Newton Peripherals had of a mouse that would fit into an available open slot on a notebook, connect without wires using Bluetooth technology and provide that ease of navigation on a screen that we were so used to getting on our desktops was a grand dream.  But dreams and their realizations are what makes us so unique and it was this dream that led to the growth and the ultimate success of the first MoGo Mouse.” 

Mobility On The Go.  MoGo.  At any rate, thanks for a great article, keep enjoying the mouse!

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