Having Fun At The Cusp Of Technology And Entertainment: Phunware CEO Alan Knitowski (Part 2)

Sramana: What was going on in your mind that drove you to establish Phunware? Obviously there is a huge transition going on between feature phones and smart phones. What did you want to do in that space?

Alan Knitowski: Three years ago when we looked at this space, we found interesting parallels between the circuit switching and packet switching worlds. In the circuit switching world, we had Nortel, Erickson, Lucent, Alcatel, and Siemens. They were the incumbents of the old technology. The new technology was the packet switching folks like Cisco, 3Com, Bay Networks, and the like. The debate back then was how much business the new folks were going to get.

When we looked at the mobile space, especially the world of applications, we realized that we could not figure out the answer to a simple question: Who is the leader in branded mobile application infrastructure and experiences? We looked around the world and could not find one. At the time when the app charts came out, they were filled with trivial games. We thought there was a great opportunity to come in and focus on complicated environments for mobile with anytime, anywhere audiences. Most people were trying to do the ‘get rich quick’ on iTunes, while we looked at where the money was and what corporate America’s needs were, and we went to market on a global basis. We treated the United States and English as a use case instead of as a primary market.

Sramana: When you launched in 2009, what did you launch with?

Alan Knitowski: When we first launched, we did a lot of building. Our business focuses on three areas of the mobile application ecosystem. One area is the apps themselves. We wanted to create branded mobile experiences. We did not want them to be bite-sized apps or little features. We wanted to take large brands and deliver that brand to the customers. For [the] Discovery Channel we looked at Myth Busters and tried to figure out everything that a fan of Myth Busters would care about, not just the shopping. We wanted all of the media included that we could get include. We wanted to get gaming wrapped around the shows. We wanted activity with the audience.

Sramana: Who was your first customer?

Alan Knitowski: Our first customer was a company called YourMembership, which had over 700 customers. They dealt with membership data for foundations, non-profits, and associations. We created mobile extensions to their SaaS platform to support mobile communities to their platforms worldwide.

Sramana: What is the business model that you follow?

Alan Knitowski: We have a range of engagements that range from partner at one extreme, where we co-invest and share in the risk and reward, to the other end of the spectrum where we do professional services engagements where we do not share in the revenue streams. In that case the customer pays a premium for us to build those experiences.

On the back end, if we are doing the partner model, we have about 15 modules of infrastructure that solve complicated problems for operations or monetization. In the partner model we bring all of those models to bear in our partnership at no fee. If we are doing a professional services deal, we will allow people to pick and choose which pieces to included and can include a revenue share against some modules.

We support apps, the infrastructure behind the apps, and we have a studio that feeds content to those apps.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Having Fun At The Cusp Of Technology And Entertainment: Phunware CEO Alan Knitowski
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