John SanGiovanni

Zumobi has built apps for numerous established brands, such as NBC’s “Meet the Press,” MSNBC, Motor Trend magazine, REI and The Sporting News.

But Zumobi is different from the competition — apps are built for established brands, and both parties split the ad revenue earned from Zumobi’s ad network.

Recently I chatted with John SanGiovanni, Zumobi’s co-founder and vice president of product design, about Zumobi’s unique strategy and the future of mobile.

When was Zumobi founded? We were founded in 2006. I was a mobile technical evangelist at Microsoft Research. I was doing a bunch of research on user interfaces and mobile advertising. Around 2005, we had come up with a really innovative way to integrate advertising and content. They packaged up my patent portfolio and we spun off to Zumobi (then called ZenZui).

There are a lot of app development shops in Seattle; how does Zumobi differ? We don’t do any dev work at all. We partner with the top media properties in the world, and we make apps collaboratively. Both companies are incentivized to build apps that create a large user base. The ad experience is much better for the user. And it’s also better for the publisher. Unlike a work-for-hire or dev shop, we have an incentive to update the apps frequently.

In 2005, did you see mobile technology becoming what it is today? Absolutely. We wrote this paper about a tile-based mobile phone. We were really excited about these small apps that you could install on your mobile and how you can advertise with that.

We really quickly embraced the idea. One of our first branded apps was the Beijing Olympics app, which we partnered with Lenovo. We think about apps in a different way. We create apps with a publisher.

How many people work at Zumobi? Are you hiring? Forty people, and about 35 are in Seattle. We also have New York, Chicago and (San Francisco) Bay Area offices.

We’re currently hiring. One of the differentiators for Zumobi, culturally, is that we are trying to hire this artist-geek hybrid. Someone that has a good balance between left brain and right brain. We think that trying to recruit this hybrid is what makes us special. There are so many people out there that want to work only on apps, and Zumobi engineers and designers work exclusively on apps. We’ve found such a wealth of awesome talent [in Seattle].

What does the future look like? We’ve had quite a wild ride as apps have moved from an experiment to a media zeitgeist. Apps are moving from mobile to tablets. We just released our new publishing platform for iPad and Android, including the Kindle Fire.

Another trend is apps on connected televisions. For us, it’s come kind of naturally. We haven’t just taken a touch interface app and put it on a connected TV. We’re thinking about it as a multi-screen experience. We’re thinking about the connected TV in more than just porting apps to Google TV. We’ll have some announcements next year.

I have to say that I’m more excited about what the apps hold for the next year or two. We’re in the fastest-growing segment of the fastest-growing industry, and we’re thrilled to see what the next few months bring. Now we find ourselves (to be) more of a media company than just a technology company.