— Urban Airship CFO Mike Temple has stepped down from the Portland-based mobile marketing platform, according to a story on OregonLive.
The well-known startup, which helps companies such as ESPN, Groupon, Waze and others with push messaging, has seen two prominent executives leave the company this month, OregonLive reports. Previously, co-founder and senior director of data products Michael Richardson left the company after more than seven years.
According to his LinkedIn, Temple was with Urban Airship from October 2013 until June. As accomplishments, he cites guiding the company through four financings totaling more than $36 million. He also mentions that he served as interim CEO and “steered the company through a turbulent period when the former CEO resigned.”
OregonLive reports that this was when founding CEO Scott Kveton stepped down amid accusations of sexual assault and before the company named Brett Caine as the new CEO.
Temple’s LinkedIn now lists him as president and consulting CFO of PlusPoint Consulting in Portland, which he apparently left when he moved over to Urban Airship three years ago.
GeekWire has reached out to Urban Airship for more details and we’ll update when we hear back.
— FlowPlay, the Seattle-based gaming platform developers, has appointed OpenFL founder and managing director Joshua Granick as scientist-in-residence.
Granick will work to support the growth and evolution of FlowPlay’s platform, the company says, in describing what it calls a platform development and evangelist role. He will continue to support OpenFL as managing director. FlowPlay recently transitioned its mobile products to OpenFL, and plans to transfer its entire gaming portfolio and future development to the engine.
Granick has previously held roles at Intel, HP/Palm and Blackberry, as well as numerous independent game studios. He created OpenFL to “improve the quality of immersive experiences and accelerate development time for companies building 2D projects,” the company notes.
“Thousands of games, technologies and industries are already using OpenFL, and it’s a perfect fit to enable FlowPlay’s future development plans,” Granick said in a news release. “By transitioning to OpenFL, FlowPlay has increased the versatility of the company’s multiplayer platform while accelerating development times and freeing up more resources to focus on new innovation. I’m eager to become a part of that process and help raise awareness on how OpenFL can help other developers in the casual games industry.”
— HTC Vive has named Rahul Sandil, a former Xbox manager, as the VP of global marketing for its Virtual Reality Store, according to Venture Beat.
Sandil’s LinkedIn page indicates that he will “lead a team of marketers who are responsible for building on VIVE’s success in providing VR Content Developers access to a global community of highly engaged customers.”
In two years at Microsoft, July 2013 to November 2015, he was responsible for digital marketing, customer acquisition, engagement and community management for the team behind Project Spark. He also led marketing for an incubation group in the HoloLens experiences team, according to his bio.
Sandil spent nine months as head of marketing for Amazon Video Direct before leaving for HTC.
— NetMotion Wireless, Seattle-based providers of mobile performance management, security and traffic optimization software, announced an expansion into Japan with the appointment of Takahiro Narita as Japan Country Manager.
A mobility solutions expert, Narita is a veteran of Dell and will be responsible for building the Japanese market for NetMotion’s software solutions as well as developing and managing a partner network of top tier distributors and systems integrators.
According to a NetMotion release, Japan has a rapidly growing mobile workforce of nearly 14 million people and businesses there invested more than $1.2 billion in mobile security solutions as part of workplace transformation initiatives.
“Our solutions solve secure connectivity and application performance issues which dramatically increase mobile worker productivity,” said Christopher Kenessey, CEO of NetMotion. “The growing global demand for our solutions combined with the upsurge in mobility projects across Japan make it a logical area of focus for us. I’m thrilled that our Mobility and Diagnostics Japanese localization is completed and that we have such an experienced executive in Mr. Narita to lead our Japan efforts.”
