Strobe Gets $2.5 Million To Make The Mobile Web Dance With Apple-Like JavaScript And HTML5 Moves

In June of 2008, we wrote about SproutCore , and open source framework that was demoed that year at the WWDC event put on by Apple. The reason they were demoing it was because it was going to be the technology powering the soon-to-be-released MobileMe experience on the web. Apple had actually been using the framework with .Mac before that as well. And for good reason: the guy who created it, Charles Jolley, worked for them. Now Jolley is trying to open up that work to the rest of the web with his startup Strobe . And they've just gotten some big backing from O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Hummer Winblad to make it happen. So what exactly is Strobe? GigaOm's Om Malik had a nice interview with Jolley back in July after he left Apple to talk about the project. Essentially, Strobe is a company built to help developers around the web code mobile applications with the SproutCore framework, which again, Jolley created. The idea is to use JavaScript and HTML5 to create touch-based apps which run as if they're built using native code. The best known examples to date are some of the MobileMe apps and iWork.com, which Jolley helped drive the development of at Apple.