As a startup aiming to disrupt the personal computing continuum, San Diego’s SweetLabs represents an intriguing challenge to the Microsoft juggernaut.
With the new Windows 8 operating system scheduled for general availability next month, SweetLabs recently completed beta testing its Pokki technology for the desktop PC, saying Pokki now has more than 1 million monthly active users. The San Diego startup, with venture funding from Google, Intel, and others, introduced its Pokki app platform last summer.
“We know we have a long ways to go, with 1.3 billion PC users worldwide,” SweetLabs co-founder Chester Ng wrote to me by email yesterday. “But we’re excited by this early sign we may be onto something… in our crazy mission to reinvent the PC experience.”
Pokki is a combination app store and app launcher that lets users start programs directly from the Windows taskbar—even Web-based apps like Gmail that would normally require opening a browser. The milestone is technically 1 million monthly active users (MAUs)—people who have not only downloaded and installed Pokki, but who actually have been actively using Pokki’s collection of apps and games. Ng would not disclose a more relevant number, which is the growth rate of Pokki users. But he writes, “To give you an idea of what our recent trajectory has looked like, we’ve roughly doubled on average every month over the past six months.”
As I’ve explained before, Pokki is a platform that’s intended to
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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