Mobile Titan, Laurence Alexander, takes the CEO job at ROK

When you’re preparing for substantial and signficiant investment, or the likes of an IPO, there’s a few things you have to do. Sort out your legals, get your old shareholders in line, make sure everyone’s got their option agreements to hand — and get a decent CEO to take you to the next level.

That’s not to cast a shadow on the outgoing CEO, no, not at all. It’s recognising that zero-to-a-few-million requires a particular set of qualities — a-few-million-to-Millions requires an entirely different set of qualities. For mobile television pioneer ROK, this set of requirements comes in the form of Mobile Titan, Laurence Alexander.

The news release I got through from ROK describes Laurence as a Mobile Heavyweight. Entirely accurate, given his pedigree at o2 and more recently, as CEO of mobile handset manufacturer, Emblaze.

Laurence was the chap who was responsible for bringing Blackberry to the UK via o2. For that, I upgraded his status in my eyes from Mobile Heavyweight to Mobile Titan. Blackberry changed my business lifestyle forever.

A quick ROK refresher:

Formed in 2003, ROK Entertainment Group currently employs 150 staff worldwide and has, to date, been privately financed. ROK has filed more than 40 patent applications for a suite of mobile technologies it has developed ranging from unicast mobile TV streamed over 2.5G, 3G and Wi-Fi networks through to content-loaded memory cards and mobile VoIP and content applications.

ROK is about to do an IPO through a share exchange with US publicly listed company CyberFund, Inc. (CYFD) so on the back of what they’ve already achieved, they’ll be going through the roof shortly.

The obligatory Mobile Titan quote from Laurence:

“I’ve been amazed and impressed at all that Jonathan and the team at ROK has achieved over the past three or four years and I’m delighted to be joining the company at this exciting time” said Alexander. “We’ll be looking to consolidate our position as a world leader in the provision of mobile entertainment services and applications through partnerships with handset manufacturers and mobile operators around the world”.

We’re expecting great things, Laurence 😀 No pressure!