Comments on: Motricity Sells PocketGear Business to Its Own Co-Founder

Jud Bowman, a co-founder of Motricity, announced today that he has acquired the smartphone applications business from Motricity, which includes PocketGear and the former PalmGear and Smartphone.net websites. Bowman along with venture capital firms Noro-Moseley Partners and Wakefield Group are financing the deal and the creation of a new venture around the businesses called PocketGear.

PocketGear claims a network of more than 30,000 developers and 50,000 mobile applications. PocketGear powers smartphone application distribution for direct channels including PocketGear.com and storefronts for its partners including Palm, Sony Ericsson, Sprint, T-Online, and AOL.

 Freeware

gmayhak @ 6/5/2008 2:17:37 AM #

I really hope Mr. Bowman will allow access to the thousands of Shareware and freeware programs that weren't 'migrated' to PocketGear and are still sitting there on the PalmGear legacy site but can only be accessed by the developers. They represent a part of the SmartPhone/PDA history and it's a damn shame they're being lost because someone can't make a buck off of them.

Gary

Tech Center Labs

 Who cares?

cstamper @ 6/5/2008 11:05:11 AM #

Does anyone even use pocketgear? It all ended with the palmgear merge... :-(

I make most my sales @ swc.palm.com nowadays, so I hardly care about whatever happens 'over there'.

http://tinyurl.com/2ooncg

 RE: Who cares?

Dera @ 6/5/2008 11:44:07 AM #

It would be a big positive to the PalmOS community to have these freeware and shareware apps available again. Many times, freeware and shareware give people a "taste", and then they go on to purchase commercial software. Also, there are a lot of apps in the freeware and shareware categories that have never turned into commercial apps, so the loss of these is a huge asset loss for the PalmOS user.

 RE: Who cares?

dkirker @ 6/5/2008 3:35:37 PM #

cstamper, then you are using Motricity. The Palm Software Connection uses Motricity (the Pocket Gear people) to deal with sales.

 RE: Who cares?

cstamper @ 6/6/2008 12:26:45 PM #

dkirker: You're right. But the report tools let me see which storefront sells most. And most sales are from the PalmOne Software Connection store, hardly any from PocketGear.

So Motricity is top-level and PocketGear & SWC are just stores.

http://tinyurl.com/2ooncg