Motricity's PocketGear Sold To CTO Bowman; Standalone Business Gets Outside Investment

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Joseph Weisenthal

mocoNews.net
Wednesday, June 4, 2008; 10:59 PM

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.

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