280 North
Cappuccino News 2016 February 1st.
| Date | Investors | Amount | Round |
|---|---|---|---|
| investor investor investor | €0.0 | round | |
| investor | €0.0 | round | |
$20.0m Valuation: $20.0m | Acquisition | ||
| Total Funding | 000k | ||
280 North, Inc. was a web software development firm established in 2008 by college friends Tom Robinson, Francisco Tolmasky, and Ross Boucher. The founding team possessed a strong background in Apple's ecosystem, with Tolmasky having worked on the original iPhone's Safari browser and Boucher on the iTunes store. This experience heavily influenced their approach to web development, aiming to bring the sophistication of desktop applications to the web browser. The company was a participant in the Y Combinator Winter 2008 batch.
The core of 280 North's business was the creation of a software stack designed to build complex, browser-based applications that mimic the feel of native desktop software. This was achieved through two key open-source technologies they developed: Objective-J, a programming language modeled after Objective-C that is a strict superset of JavaScript, and Cappuccino, a framework that ports Apple's Cocoa APIs to the web. This allowed developers to build applications without directly manipulating HTML or the DOM, focusing instead on a proven object-oriented architecture. The company's flagship product, 280 Slides, demonstrated the power of this stack. It was a presentation application, similar to PowerPoint or Keynote, that ran entirely within a web browser and offered features like importing and exporting PowerPoint files. They were also developing a visual IDE called Atlas to further simplify the creation of these web applications.
In August 2010, after raising only $250,000 in external funding, 280 North was acquired by Motorola for a reported $20 million. The acquisition was driven by Motorola's desire to leverage the team's expertise in web application development to enhance its Android software portfolio. Following the acquisition, the Cappuccino and Objective-J frameworks remained open-source, but Atlas, the visual IDE, was kept private by Motorola.
Keywords: Objective-J, Cappuccino framework, web application development, 280 Slides, Motorola acquisition, Y Combinator, web software, open source, desktop-class applications, JavaScript framework