Today we’re very pleased to announce the appointment of Andy Gstoll, formerly with Lonely Planet and Electronic Arts Mobile, as new CEO of Mobilizy/Wikitude. Philipp Breuss-Schneeweis, founder and former CEO will concentrate on R&D.

Andy Gstoll, Mobilizy

Philipp Breuss-Schneeweis founded Mobilizy, the company behind Wikitude, in May 2009 as a startup focusing on Smartphone software development and Augmented Reality (AR). Wikitude has been the first mobile AR application available to end users  launching with the G1 Android phone in October 2008. Since then Wikitude has won numerous awards, including the Grand Prize at the Global LBS Navteq Challenge, and grew to the leading player in the AR space. Mobilizy has been profitable from day 1 thanks to a very impressive client base with names such as Red Bull, Ogilvy, and Lonely Planet.

For Philipp Breuss-Schneeweis, it was the depth of Andy Gstoll’s experience and expertise that led to the decision to hand over his CEO title and change his position at this point in time. “Andy brings in all the key qualifications for Wikitude/Mobilizy to ensure the further growth of our company. His expertise in mobile content and applications combined with his background in digital platform monetization as well as his international experience in the travel and telecommunication sectors were the winning factors for this decision. If you can get someone of this acumen in, you have to seize the opportunity. Andy will make sure that we will continue on our path of very fast usage growth.”

Andy Gstoll says:

I have been fascinated by what the brilliant team at Mobilizy has created for a quite some time.
My first contact with Philipp, founder of Mobilizy, was during my time at Lonely Planet when we worked together on the Lonely Planet Compass City Guides for Android, one of the first augmented reality apps powered by the Wikitude AR technology. After shifting from Lonely Planet to Electronic Arts (EA) Mobile in Singapore I have continued to follow Mobilizy’s journey from being the AR pioneer in 2008 to becoming the leader in the AR browser segment in 2009, to expanding strategically to yet another ground breaking AR platform earlier this year: the new Wikitude Drive navigation application, which will and partly has already reinvented the mobile navigation industry. As much as I have been impressed by the various successes and awards won by Mobilizy including the grand prize at the Global Navteq LBS challenge at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, I have decided to join Mobilizy and to move across continents because of its outstanding team which never seems to stop pushing the boundaries of innovation. I am now very happy to be part of this fantastic group and look forward to working with all of you. AR is only at the very beginning and it’s here to stay. It is extremely exciting to be part of this leading company in this so rapidly growing AR space. I invite all of you developers, content providers, handset manufacturers, carriers and every one else out there to join us on this journey of building this new, expanding, exciting and most of all profitable AR ecosystem.”

Discover your World with us.
Cheers!
Andy