Skyfire is a hot new mobile web browser that touts itself as “The PC web. On your phone.” It also touts itself as “real fast,” something which new team addition Mike Rowehl will have a hand in maintaining as the company’s scalability architect.
We last wrote about Rowehl two months ago when the mobile web browser Mowser, a company Rowehl co-founded and was chief executive of, was purchased by the Ireland-based consortium dotMobi. He stayed on for a bit to help with the transition, but now has moved on.
Rowehl, who has experience as a programmer, an entrepreneur and a blogger, will be in charge of propelling the Skyfire’s architecture and development forward. The company should have plenty of money with which to make that happen after securing a $13 million second round at the end of May.
Skyfire is competing in the mobile browser space with Opera Mini and soon Mobile Firefox. However, in practice, Skyfire may be more like Apple’s Safari browser running on the iPhone. After all, as we’ve had drilled into our brains from the commercials, the iPhone is the “real Internet,” in your pocket. If that is true, Skyfire is just a bit more real as it includes one key element that Safari does not: Adobe Flash support.
However, right now Skyfire only works on Windows Mobile devices. The plan is to add Symbian support sometime this Summer.
The software is still in private beta testing, but you can sign up to be included on the company’s site.
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8:06 am
Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility » Blog Archive » New Position at Skyfire - Come Join Us! said:
[...] news is out and public now that I’ve joined Skyfire in full. I’ve had to dance around the subject for a while. Luckily I was already doing some [...]
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MobileBeat: We’ve added free session for developers, including operators » VentureBeat said:
[...] Rowehl, SkyFire — Mike is an entrepreneur, hacker an programmer, now an architect at mobile browser company, SkyFire. He’s the organizer and co-founder of the Silicon Valley chapter of Mobile Monday and [...]
10:43 am
Denis wonderful life! » Blog Archive » Mobile browser Skyfire comes to Symbian devices. We have 100 private beta invites said:
[...] back in May led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. This followed an initial $4.8 million round. The company hired former Mowser co-founder Mike Rowehl to be its scalability architect last [...]