Mobile browsing startup Skyfire gets new CEO from Travelocity

Skyfire, a company that brings a rich web browsing experience to smartphones, just announced a new chief executive — Jeffrey Glueck, who left his position as Travelocity‘s chief marketing officer earlier this year.

Nitin Bhandari, who co-founded the Mountain View, Calif., company and served as its chief executive until now, will remain involved as Skyfire’s chief product officer. The company tells me Bhandari always planned to focus on product and hand the CEO role over to someone else once Skyfire got off the ground. And with a browser that has more than 1 million users and recently left beta testing, Skyfire is certainly off to a good start. (Co-founder Eric Swenson is still serving as the company’s chief technology officer too.)

Glueck comes from the startup world himself, having co-founded a company called Site59 that was acquired by Travelocity in 2002. He told me that while at Travelocity, he became very focused on revenue, especially online advertising. During his time there, the company grew from $3.5 billion to $10.6 billion in annual sales.

Now that he’s at Skyfire, Glueck said, he has three main goals: Continue innovation around the product, bring Skyfire to even more smartphones (it’s currently on Nokia, Samsung, LG, HTC, Palm, and Motorola phones, with a BlackBerry version still in testing), and start partnering with other companies to develop mobile versions of their websites. That third goal, which Skyfire hasn’t really explored yet, could be a big opportunity, Glueck said.

“Skyfire has built the best mobile browser, but I also see it potentially as the world’s best branded mobile app platform,” he said.

The company has raised a total of $17.8 million in venture funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Trinity Ventures, and Matrix Partners.

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