What do Nexbit and Cyanogen Have in Store?
The rumor mill is churning up many possibilities for the result of Nexbit’s new partnership with Cyanogen. Reportedly, together they are working on “something really cool,” but everyone seems to be, as of yet, unsure what the ‘cool’ thing actually is.
San Francisco-based Nextbit, is a Mobile-Cloud Startup that just recently snagged up Scott Croyle as the Vice President of Design and Product. This is after him having stepped down from his role as Senior Vice President of Design and User Experience at HTC, in April of this year. Croyle will also join the company’s board of directors together with Rich Miner, from Google Ventures who notably was previously a co-founder of Android, and Rich Wong, a serial angel investor from Accel Partners.
According to a post on Cyanogen’s Google Plus page, they are “looking for a select group of intrepid +CyanogenMod users to help test something really cool!” Currently called “Nextbit private alpha”, all that is for certain is that it is for mobile devices. At present it is in alpha testing, and to participate in the project and try out features, CyanogenMod users must apply through a survey.
CyanogenMod is open source operating system for smartphones and tablets, which is based on the Android OS.
There are speculations that is could be new a next generation Android phone, which is supported by a question on the survey that requests you to let Nextbit collect anonymized metrics on your device & app usage. Moreover, now that Croyle has joined the team with several design award under his belt a new phone would be warmly welcomed. Thus far, Nexbit’s website simply states “Hold tight, we’re in the middle of building something great.”
“As an industry, we’re really just getting started with mobile,” Nextbit CEO Tom Moss said. “At Nextbit, we are building a world class engineering team to tackle big technical problems. We know Scott is the right person to guarantee that all the technology we build focuses on creating unique mobile experiences for users.”
Nextbit are enthusiastic about the role Croyle will play in Nextbit’s plans, as CTO Mike Chan said, “We’re excited to start using our technology to bring several unique consumer experiences to market later this year, and Scott will play a big role in this next phase of our company.”
Croyle is equally excited and is reported as saying, “Helping Nextbit build transformative experiences based on breakthrough technologies is the perfect fit for me… This is an awesome team and a great opportunity to create experiences that delight people and redefine the understanding of what is possible with mobile.”
Nextbit, founded by former Google executives Tom Moss and Mike Chan, has already raised $18 million in Series A funding back in January from Accel Partners and Google Ventures. They currently boast a team of former employees from Google, Amazon, Apple, and Dropbox. It will be exciting to watch what technologies emerge from this partnership.
