By Allan Maurer
DURHAM, NC—Jud Bowman, co-founder of Motricity, has received an investment in an undisclosed amount from Noro-Moseley Partners and Wakefield Group to acquire the smartphone applications business from Motricity and launch a new venture, PocketGear.
Bowman will leave the Motricity board, but remains a major stock holder. Bowman tells TechJournal South his desire to remain in the Research Triangle area played a major role in his decision.
“I’ve lived here all my life, and we’ve been evangelizing for the RTP and North Carolina. I want to be able to another great $100 million company here.”
Motricity is closing its Durham headquarters, laying off more than 200, and moving most of its operations to Bellevue, Washington. The company is restructuring its business around the InfoSpace technology it purchased in 2007.
Bowman says that PocketGear will launch with 15 people and $10 million in revenue. It will be hiring additional technology, marketing, and business operations staff.
Established business assets
Bowman will serve as president and CEO of the new company, which will be headquartered in Durham with offices in Munich, Germany. PocketGear has a deal to remain in the Motricity offices through the third quarter but will seek new quarters in Raleigh, Durham, or the RTP, says Bowman. “We’ll make the decision based on economics,” he adds.
PocketGear provides a platform connecting millions of people around the world with smartphone applications.
PocketGear powers smartphone application distribution for direct channels including PocketGear.com, SymbianGear.com, PalmGear.com, Smartphone.net, and Mobile2Day.de and for more than 15 partners including Palm, Sony Ericsson, Sprint, T-Online, and AOL.
“Mobile phones are increasingly smartphones that run advanced operating systems such as Palm OS, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Symbian OS or Linux, and Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android are helping accelerate smartphone adoption,” said Bowman in a statement.
“The smartphone application market is poised for significant growth, and PocketGear is a platform that connects more than 30,000 developers of smartphone applications with millions of smartphone users around the world.
Bowman says that when Motricity closed its deal with InfoSpace, the company board had to make a tough decision regarding a move to Bellevue, near Seattle. “We ran the numbers and had to do what was best for the shareholders,” Bowman says.
“When I stepped away from that, it was wrong for me on personal and emotional levels.” Then, the opportunity to buy Motricity’s smartphone business presented itself the same week.
“I had to decide whether I wanted to buy this or start a new company with a clean sheet,” he says. Buying the established business offered a number of advantages, he says, so he won a bid to buy the business.
“This business has a lot of assets. It’s a business we know like the back of our hands. We’ve got 30,000 developers, millions of customers from 200 countries, and a passionate team. This is a huge headstart,” Bowman says.
Elliot, Nelson join boar
“While it’s difficult to leave Motricity, I’m incredibly excited about the opportunity to lead PocketGear and build a great company based in the Research Triangle Park area of North Carolina,” said Bowman.
PocketGear said that Mike Elliott, general partner at Noro-Moseley Partners, and Steve Nelson, managing director of Wakefield Group, have joined PocketGear’s board of directors. Nelson is stepping down from the Motricity board.
Bowman co-founded Motricity and was instrumental in raising $400 million of venture capital and growing Motricity to more than $100 million in annual revenues and 500 employees globally supporting one of the industry’s leading mobile content delivery platforms that delivers more than $1 billion of content to mobile phones per year.
Bowman has been named as one of the world’s “Top 100 Young Innovators” by MIT’s Technology Review and one of “Tech’s Best Young Entrepreneurs” by BusinessWeek in 2007. He was also recognized as a winner of the Carolinas’ Ernst & Young “Entrepreneur of the Year” award in 2001.
On the Web: www.pocketgear.com
© 2008, TechJournal South. All rights reserved.
