Finally, McNamee’s desire to be taken seriously as a rocker goes a long way—though perhaps not far enough—toward explaining the drug references Chubby Wombat works into every show. “If you’ve got any brown acid left over from Woodstock, this would be a good time to take it,” he told several thousand people at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco. In Las Vegas, he playfully offered to help the 150 or so audience members test the quality of their weed. And in Big Sky, Montana—elevation: 7,200 feet—he told the assembly, “The higher you are, the better we sound.”
Though Chubby Wombat never mentions Elevation Partners, his shtick certainly gives new meaning to the firm’s name. McNamee calls it theater. “When you’re a performer, you have to entertain,” he says. “Our investors know what I’m like. If they ever tire of me, they can always fire me.”
So no dope smoking, then? “None of your business,” he scolds. “This is America.”
But as McNamee devotes more and more time to Moonalice—traveling from Skagway, Alaska, to Teaneck, New Jersey, playing as many as nine shows in 10 days—it seems fair to ask: Are his Elevation partners worried about the impact his night job might have on his day job? To a man, they say no. “Letting Roger be Roger,” Bodnick says, “has been a big part of our success.”
One morning in his Menlo Park office, where a huge stuffed version of the rat from the film Ratatouille shares space with several Mr. Potato Heads, McNamee is talking about Palm—and, of course, his band. “Letting people download full CD-quality files of your music is not a common practice in the music business,” he says of Moonalice’s decision to do just that. “I don’t know if it’s going to work any more than I know if Palm is going to work.”
Currently, there are 2.7 billion cell-phone subscribers in the world, and more than a billion phones are sold each year. Only about 10 percent are in the smartphone, or mobile-computer, market, in which Palm is trying to compete. (The company’s market share has dwindled to about 19 percent, a precipitous tumble from its glory days in 1999, when the Palm Pilot was the gadget to beat.) But as handheld devices increasingly blur the lines between telecommunications, computing, and entertainment, smartphone sales are expected to more than double by 2011.
With a market that huge, Elevation believes, you don’t have to trounce your rivals to make a great deal of money. But you do have to carve out a niche. Even before the Elevation investment, Palm was replacing its aging software, which had been updated over the years with the tech equivalent of rubber bands and chewing gum. Now it’s focusing on hardware. At Elevation’s urging, Palm just hired Jonathan Rubinstein, a former Apple engineer who led the team that developed the iPod. McNamee believes that Palm can begin to differentiate itself with innovative designs and new types of devices that meet consumers’ various needs. BlackBerry may rule in the corporate market. Apple’s iPhone is mostly a media phone. (McNamee calls it “the coolest 1.0 product in memory.”) But there’s still plenty of room, he asserts, for both high-end toys and affordable ones (like Palm’s new $99 no-frills Centro phone).
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