San Diego’s Antengo Marching to Next Round in Mobile Classified Ads
Marcus Wandell tells me he was attending a music festival in New York City’s Lower East Side in 2009, “getting price-gouged on a $12 beer,” when he came up with the idea for Antengo. What if there was a mobile app that could help you find the nearby places to buy a less-expensive beer?
Since then, the concept has broadened beyond serving as a marketplace for finding deals at live events to encompass the universe of classified advertising.
“It started as a B2C play, but it has evolved into a peer-to-peer exchange” says Wandell, who was working in digital advertising for Microsoft at the time. Antengo’s CEO says he interviewed 40 prospective co-founders before meeting Hunter Jensen, a Web and mobile app developer in San Diego. Jensen already had experience with online classified ads, but he was reluctant to leave San Diego, so they agreed to start the company here.
Marcus Wandell
They founded Antengo in 2010, and in four months developed their flagship product—a free mobile app for iOS that provides a real-time, location-based platform for listing and selling anything from concert tickets to coffee makers.
Listings are just 144 characters, leading the company to describe its technology as “Craigslist meets Twitter for mobile.”
In a little over two years, Antengo has featured more than 5 million classified ads and job postings. More recently, Wandell and Jensen have extended Antengo’s core technology from
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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