With Debut of Pokki Desktop Apps, OpenCandy Founders Create New Corporate Identity
product, and offer it as an optional download.
“When we started three years ago, we really wanted to start a company that could solve business problems for software developers in the applications space, things like distribution, monetization, and analytics,” Ng says. After 350 million software installs, the OpenCandy business continues to go well, and Ng says it made sense for the product to retain the OpenCandy brand and to re-brand the company.
Chester Ng
An interesting footnote in the change to SweetLabs is that OpenCandy co-founders Ng and Darrius Thompson were previously at San Diego’s DivX (now operated as part of Novato, CA-based Sonic Solutions), where the company, its core software product, and video codec all shared the same name.
“We did consider a brand architecture similar to what we had established at DivX,” Ng says. However, the driving factor in establishing the new corporate name, SweetLabs, was to broaden the scope of the company brand given the launch of Pokki.
“OpenCandy is a B2B brand representing solutions for software developers to make money and reach new users,” Ng says. “In fact, we may roll out additional products (beyond our software network) in the future under that OpenCandy brand umbrella that achieve the same objectives. Pokki, on the other hand, is both a B2B and B2C brand representing our mission to bring the modern one-click, always-on app experience to billions of desktops worldwide.”
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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