Handmark

» see handmark.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Handmark was assembled in 2000 in Kansas City out of a merger between Mobile Generation Software and Palmspring Software, and the name says what it was for. It sold software you could get onto a handheld, at a time when getting software onto a handheld was genuinely difficult. There was no store on the device. There was a web page you opened on a desktop computer and a cable running down to a cradle.

The early years were Palm OS. In 2001 it bought MemoWare, the Palm-era repository of free documents and e-books, and over the following years it widened out to Windows Mobile and then to BlackBerry. It published games as well as utilities, and the one Palm people still name is Warfare Incorporated, a real-time strategy game that won a PalmSource award and had no business running on a device with that little memory.

The product that carried the company was Pocket Express, a subscription that pushed news and sports scores onto a handheld over whatever data connection it could find. It passed twenty million users, which for a distribution business operating before any app store existed is a serious figure, and it is why a company in Kansas City had a working relationship with carriers at all. The British studio Astraware joined the Handmark group in january 2008 and its management bought itself back out in january 2010. FreeRange Communications came in during 2009 and its mobile RSS reader was folded into Pocket Express.

The handheld in question was never the handheld I had. Turkey ran on Nokia through the whole of the 2000s and a Palm was something you saw in an American film before you saw one on a desk in Ankara. What I recognize in Handmark is not the device, it is the problem the company existed to solve. Somebody had to stand between the person who wrote a program and the person holding the machine, because the machine had no way of finding the program by itself. That entire profession was deleted by one icon on a phone in 2008 and nobody has gone looking for it since.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what you actually bought ~

Between 2000 and 2006 Handmark raised around $10 million from investors including Motorola Ventures, which is the sort of money it took to run a catalog business in that era. The catalog was the product. Handmark argued its way onto devices and into carrier decks, then wrapped other people's software in its own billing and took a cut. There was nothing unusual in the model. It was how every mobile software company worked, because no alternative existed.

Consider what had to be built in order to sell you one $20 program. There was a storefront per platform, because Palm OS and Windows Mobile each wanted their own build and their own installer, and behind that there had to be standing relationships with carriers who decided what a customer would ever be shown. There was also a whole publishing platform under the feeds inside Pocket Express, eventually spun out on its own as Freerange 360 and renamed Storycode in 2012. That is an enormous amount of company sitting between an author and a reader.

~ the pivot ~

By the end of the decade the business of selling software had gone. Apple's store opened in july 2008 and Android's arrived behind it, and within roughly two years the middleman between a developer and a device had stopped being necessary. Handmark did what the survivors did and moved into advertising. Its subsidiary OneLouder Apps made free apps with ads in them, TweetCaster for Twitter and BaconReader for Reddit, which together cleared twenty million downloads and were growing fast enough for a carrier to notice.

Sprint noticed. The deal completed in april 2013 and then got reported twice, once in may and again in september, which is roughly the attention a thirteen-year-old mobile software company commanded by then. All fifty employees stayed, both brands were nominally left alone, and the actual point of it was Handmark's advertising expertise going into Sprint's Pinsight Media unit. Augie Grasis, who founded the company, called it a natural progression of an existing relationship. Within months handmark.com was redirecting to a store subdomain, by 2016 it was redirecting to onelouder.com, and today it does not resolve at all.

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