Motricity’s PocketGear Sold To CTO Bowman; Standalone Business Gets Outside Investment
Motricity had previously said it would sell off its direct-to-consumer smartphone business PocketGear, and now we know who’s buying it: the company’s own CTO and co-founder Jud Bowman. In an announcement this morning, Bowman says he has left Motricity and acquired the unit with investment backing from Noro-Moseley Partners and Wakefield Group. Pocketgear provides a platform connecting smartphone users with a claimed 30,000 developers. The company will be headquartered in Durham, NC, with offices in Munich. Neither the terms of the purchase nor the venture investment were disclosed. Release.
Tricia adds: The News & Observer newspaper has a full-length feature on the 27-year-old Bowman today. He’s betting on building the PocketGear businesses, which includes PocketGear.com, SymbianGear.com, PalmGear.com, Smartphone.net, Mobile2Day.de, and storefronts for Palm (NSDQ: PALM), Sony (NYSE: SNE) Ericsson (NSDQ: ERIC) and AOL (NYSE: TWX), into a $100 million revenue business. As the co-founder of Motricity, where he helped build some of the original code as an 18-year-old, he’s compared to Bill Gates with similar hair and glasses. Despite having all these details, the story has no further specifics on the deal’s financials.
Motricity has never been profitable and they are selling this business…hmmm??? These guys are in way over their heads trying to make this work. Handango will eat them for lunch. Sales on all the storefronts they're taking over have been steadily declining over the past year. Not exactly a hot product offering during a lagging economy. Having said all that, I hope they can beat the odds because they're certainly stacked against Bowman and company.
The D2C was the only consistently profitable area in Mo. Maybe because nobody worked on it. It was a big steaming pile of… code. If he can make it work with all the developers gone, more power to him.
Name says it all. Lets hope for a speedy liquidation in WA. Too bad for the poor Infospace suckers. You will be hunting for jobs before long.
Chocolate Towers for everyone!!!