Interview: Proporta

Proporta Focus Week at PocketGoddess.com concludes with an interview with Guy Monson, head of Marketing for Proporta. Read on to find out why Proporta has you “covered” at least in the handheld sense.
Thank you very much for agreeing to talk with me. I’d like to start with Proporta’s slogan, “We’ve got PDA’s covered.” What exactly do you mean by that?
That’s a double entendre as we say in France We mean that we have them covered in the sense of “we have them under control, we know all about them, we have anything you want for them” and also in the sense of case = cover so if you have a PDA in our case then it’s ‘covered’.
I remember when Proporta first started, the main products were cases for Psion devices. But now you have everything from memory cards to solar chargers. How do you decide which products to offer to handheld enthusiasts?
We basically listen to our customers a lot, we talk to other people in the industry (both supply side largely in Asia and retail side in Europe and the USA) and we meet among ourselves to see what we think is cool/useful. Our resellers give us feedback on what customers want and we talk to our own retail customers as well as the press – yourself included – if they have any tips).
Many PDA companies (and many companies in general) are trying to sell you a lifestyle (“Our cases make you look cool”) but our approach is very different. We take the view that a PDA is basically a business tool with some leisure applications. If you want to impress women in bars, you should buy a nice shirt, if you want practical solutions that make using your PDA easier, safer and more efficient, you should look at our products – we have over 400 PDA products and are considered as one of the world’s leading experts in the field.
Do you have an in-house design team creating new accessories, or is Proporta more strictly a reseller?
We design many of our own products (again with feedback from customers,resellers etc.) and we also shop around to find the best products from other designers and also to move existing designs ahead with continuous improvement.
Proprta now has a few software applications available, including Tome Raider, Mondo Pondo, and Fighting Fantasy. Why are you entering this field, when your focus until recently was exclusively on handheld cases and accessories?
We’ve been doing software for some years now and it’s something that we think will become increasingly important as people adopt Smartphones in place of PDA’s. This is something that’s happening already in Europe and Japan with the USA close on our heals. The techno-obsession of Asia and Europe is such that our home markets tend to adopt new mobile technologies earlier than the US (who then perfect the duff technology we bought and adopt the improved version ) so the Smartphone trend is clear to us. We have a team of nine full time programmers and take software very seriously. We are also working on some programming projects for other companies and we’re always looking for projects great and small – we can program a simple application for a customer or for a small company or large enterprise at very competitive rates.
Are you planning even more handheld software applications in the future? Or porting your existing applications to Windows Mobile or Symbian smartphones?
Yes to all of the above. We are working hard on new software all the time. If you’d like to know more, I’ll be happy to have our Director of Software, Mat Ripley, talk you through some of the projects we’re working on.
I just might take you up on that offer! Do you have any sneak peeks you can offer my readers? We’re always excited to hear about new handheld accessories. . .
Absolutely. I’ve let Chloe know it’s OK to preview some secrets to you.
She certainly did, and I’m excited about the future for Proporta. They’ve got some cool new products coming, and I’m also trying to convince them that they need to step up and create a great case for the Tapwave Zodiac, something that’s sorely lacking in today’s accessory market. Or maybe that’s just because it’s my favorite handheld device at the moment. In any case, I’m glad that I got a chance to take a closer look at one of my favorite accessory companies, and I hope that you enjoyed it as well.