Robbie Hitchcock of San Ramon didn’t want to shell out big bucks and spend hours learning to retrieve e-mail with an iPhone, so he bought a gadget about the size of a pack of cigarettes and the thickness of a matchbook, the Peek.
Fumbling with complicated technology is not a Peek experience. The slender device, created by the founders of Virgin Mobile, makes it supremely easy to send and receive e-mail almost anywhere. And that’s all, folks; no games, camera, calendar, videos or any of the other myriad services offered by gadgets like BlackBerries or iPhones.
Peek also spares its users the $200 or so initial fee and approximately $70 monthly cost of those devices, not to mention their mandatory contracts. It’s about $100 upfront and some $20 a month thereafter, and you can opt out anytime without penalty fees.
“You can set up on a Peek in less than a minute,” said Peek’s founder, Amol Sarva, in an interview at the 25-employee firm’s Oakland office.
Peek was planned in Walnut Creek “in the cell phone aisle of Target,” Sarva said, and had its first office in Walnut Creek. The company then moved to its Oakland office, which has about 15 staffers, and three of its cofounders and principals live in the Bay Area. It does have a New York office, which is technically its headquarters.
Sarva launched his company in September, unfazed by the battering the economy is currently undergoing. His device can be bought at Target stores nationwide or at www.getpeek.com.
“In a tough economy, this is a good alternative,” Sarva said. While people want to get their e-mail anywhere and everywhere, they’re not wild about spending prodigious amounts of money in times like these, he said. Sarva and his cofounders are banking on this.
The startup has $11 million in funding from…