Smartphones are providing upward mobility for Oregon software developers.

The gadgets that brought computing to the palmtop also have invigorated young technologists clustered around downtown Portland. These small firms anticipated the devices' popularity and leapt into the wide-open market for mobile "apps," software applications designed specifically for the iPhone or similar gadgets.

Founded

: May 2009

Employees

: Four full time

Location

: Portland's Pearl District

Services

: Software that plugs into other companies' apps to make it easy to add features, such as "push" notification and purchases within apps.

Funding

: $1.1 million from True Ventures (Bay Area) and Founders Co-Op (Seattle)

App development is relatively straightforward, and online app stores relatively egalitarian. That means even tiny firms from Oregon's modest software community can compete in the emerging field.

"Urban Airship owns three laptops. That's it. Those are our assets," said Scott Kveton, whose four-person firm in Portland's Pearl District designs software tools for app developers.

"We've bootstrapped this sucker with savings and credit cards," Kveton said.

Urban Airship gets some breathing room this week. The company plans to announce today that it's raised $1.1 million in venture capital to add software engineers and services.

The funding is the first of its kind for a mobile app company in Portland, representing a milestone for the city's fledgling mobile developer community.

That community is small -- maybe 30 firms, all told, employing no more than a dozen developers apiece. But they've turned out dozens of apps, including popular titles like the Fieldrunners game and a utility called Air Sharing. Portland developers also have built apps for Starbucks, The Wall Street Journal, Nike, Intel and many other big companies.

Mobile computing has captured the attention of big tech companies, too.

At a major industry event Monday in Barcelona, Intel announced

with a parallel effort from cell phone maker Nokia. Microsoft unveiled an overhauled version of its mobile operating system at the same event, adding features Apple and Google popularized.

Other mobile developers in the area

(downtown Portland): Games and utilities, including the Air Sharing file storage app.

(Southeast Portland): Web site and mobile app contract developer

(downtown Portland): Mobile apps for Clearwire and eBay

(Missouri): Handmark acquired Southeast Portland's FreeRange Communications a year ago; the Portland office continues to manage the company's mobile publishing business. Clients include The Wall Street Journal and the Portland Trail Blazers.

(downtown Vancouver): Mobile maps

Night & Day Studios (Southeast Portland): Develops apps in-house, and as a contractor

(Northwest Portland): Mobile app contract developer; clients include Barnes & Noble, Nike and Intel

Stumptown Game Machine (Portland): Mobile game developer

(Portland): Designer of the popular Fieldrunners game

(Portland): Mobile app contractor; clients include Starbucks, Zipcar and Whole Foods

Eventually, the mobile space may suffer the kind of painful shakeout that befell other maturing technologies. App stores are already crowded as developers from all over the world converge to peddle their wares.

At the moment, though, mobile keeps growing. Developers anticipate a fresh infusion of app demand when Apple releases its iPad tablet computer next month. And, with startup costs low, sometimes a good idea is all it takes to thrive.

"That barrier has been brought down so that you have a one- or two-person shop that builds something and gets distribution and can make money," said Peter Farago, vice president of marketing for Flurry Inc., a California company that tracks activity in the mobile industry.

The rise of app developers is emblematic of a new direction in Oregon technology, where software historically played a minor role.

While the Silicon Valley and Seattle built large software industries in the 1980s and '90s, Oregon focused on high-tech manufacturing.

Many of those production jobs vanished in the dot-com contraction at the start of the last decade, never to return, as manufacturing shifted overseas. Fifteen years of job gains were wiped out, sending the state's high-tech employment back to 1996 levels.

Even as hardware was fading, software development became more open and collaborative, allowing small companies and individual developers to make headway in an industry largely dominated by power players like Microsoft.

With mobile apps, that trend has continued.

"We're big for an iPhone company," said Dave Howell, CEO of Avatron Software, which moved its seven employees from Vancouver last month to a new office on the 41st floor of the U.S. Bancorp Tower in downtown Portland.

The company, which makes a variety of utilities and apps for the iPhone, is toying around with ideas for the larger iPad tablet computer.

"We're thinking about what the demographic is for the iPad," Howell said who believes the larger screen will be especially inviting for young kids, given its gaming potential.

"The things we're going to be able to do, technically, are going to be much better than what we were able to do on a tiny screen," he said.

But even with bigger screens, Portland's mobile firms may remain small.

Competition is fierce, and today's independent developers might never grow really big, cautions Mark Beccue, senior analyst for consumer mobility at ABI research.

"It's not something that a lot of people are going to make a lot of money at," he said.

That doesn't mean these small companies are doomed, though. "If you're three guys in a garage, your relative sense of success is going to be smaller," Beccue said.

On that scale, the app ecosystem plays to Portland's strength, according to Raven Zachary, a nationally known iPhone developer in Portland.

"It's a very nice fit for that because most mobile development is coming from independents. Consolidation hasn't happened yet," said Zachary, whose 18-month-old firm, Small Society, builds apps for big brands, including Starbucks, Zipcar and Whole Foods.

It's not at all clear that Portland has a higher concentration of developers than other mobile hotspots -- the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle and New York City among them. But Zachary said mobile software doesn't demand geographic concentration, and he finds plenty of developer talent here at home.

"So I think there's an opportunity for this to grow up and stay in Portland," he said.

Portland has "the right DNA" for an enduring mobile cluster, agrees Jon Maroney, who founded the Portland mobile publishing firm FreeRange Communications. But, to endure, he said, mobile developers will need to grow.

A Missouri company, Handmark, bought FreeRange last year. Maroney and his staff stayed on and now run Handmark's mobile publishing business from Southeast Portland. His clients include the Portland Trail Blazers and The Wall Street Journal.

Portland's mobile startups need more big projects like those, Maroney said, and big partnerships. And he said that while the city's developers have established an expertise on the iPhone, they'll eventually need to diversify to other platforms -- such as the Blackberry and phones using Google's Android operating system.

At the moment, one hot app is enough to sustain a business. But in Maroney's view, apps will ultimately be a means to an end, connecting users to a broad range of services, online and off.

"We're not going to grow an economy here and be successful just by doing iPhone apps," he said. "It's got to be more than that."

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Mike Rogoway; twitter: @rogoway