Unwired Nation Announces Push into the Mobile Market

By Ariel Jones

Unwired Nation, a provider of mobile apps for the enterprise, recently announced record fundraising and personnel growth as part of its drive into the mobile market. Expanding beyond its original cloud-based mobile platform, the company intends break into the mobile market with their unique Unwired Nation Platform that enables rapid and easy deployment of individually branded mobile apps.

The Unwired Nation platform, which provides a simple, repeatable process for deploying and managing thousands of uniquely branded and configured applications, leverages customers' existing web applications to deliver solutions that are optimized for mobile platforms. The company's solutions support all relevant platforms, including iOS and Android smartphones and tablets. Unwired Nation will also focus on attracting customers from varied industries in the coming year, including pharmacy and financial services.

"Today, having a mobile presence, being able to conduct business, and interact with customers via mobile devices, whether smartphones or tablets, is absolutely 100% tablestakes," stated Eric Smith, Unwired Nation's CEO and co-founder. "The Unwired Nation Platform goes beyond the 'one off' approach to building mobile apps and addresses the successful web application vendor that now faces the challenge of delivering native mobile apps to customers that demand their own unique look and feel."

New Executive Team Members

In addition to the growth in funding and an intensified focus on mobile app development, Unwired also added four new executives to its team, including:

• Jay Holtz, former VC with Enhanced Capital partners, as Chief Operating Officer
• Steve Hencinski, formerly Vice President of Strategic Sales at Cedar Point Communications, as Senior Sales Executive
• Frank Geck, formerly with Nuance (the company behind Apple's Siri Virtual Assistant technology), as Director of Sales Engineering
• Will Bridges, founder of Clippy, to assist with business development

The participation of new investors led to the record $6.5 million in new funds, as well as the strengthening of partnership opportunities with established web software companies.

"We see mobile as the new web and we are here to help our customers take full advantage of the opportunity to generate substantial new mobile revenue from their existing business, quickly, easily, affordably," Smith continued. "Our platform allows our customers to remain focused on their existing web business, not on mobile development, integration or distribution."