Skyfire nabs Mike Rowehl to handle scalability

Venture Beat — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 05:30:42 -0700

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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