The New York Times has a pretty impressive website for mobile apps, with plenty of information to help its loyal readers access news on their iPhone, BlackBerry, Palm Pre, Android, and other mobile devices. As the premiere national newspaper, though, the Times also has more wherewithal than most local newspapers and broadcasters to develop customized apps for mobile devices.
So what about the rest of the media industry?
Enter Verve Wireless. The Encinitas, CA-based startup, which has been keeping a low profile, has developed a technology platform that enables a range of newspapers and other media companies to publish their content and serve ads across a host of mobile devices. The company also offers different templates so its media customers can choose how their content will be displayed and development tools that allows each media customer to create their own brand identity on Verve’s software as a service.
When Art Howe and Tom Kenney started Verve in early 2005, they saw a great opportunity to develop technology that both large and small media companies could use to serve local news and advertising to mobile devices. They also had the benefit of approaching the idea from different perspectives.
Kenney had spent the previous eight years working for Nokia Venture Partners, the Finnish telecommunications giant’s venture capital fund, which is now known as BlueRun Ventures of Menlo Park, CA. Kenney, who had been overseeing Nokia’s investments in mobile Internet technologies, says he began to see that
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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
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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