Published on by Alex King
VeloMedia and Crowd Favorite have successfully closed the deal, joining the two companies. For those of you behind the times, in October of 2013, Karim Marucchi (Founder, VeloMedia) and Alex King (Founder, Crowd Favorite) started a discussion: What if we took the skill sets and reach of both our companies, and combined them?
That simple conversation blossomed quickly into the full, and friendly, acquisition of Crowd Favorite by VeloMedia. The goal was to take the premier senior-level coding, project management and WordPress development skills of Crowd Favorite and combine them with the enterprise-level Client Management and Operations expertise of VeloMedia, with its relatively recent success in large scale WordPress deployments. The result is a global organization ready to merge its existing roster of enterprise clients, such as NatGeo, Directv, Toyota, Lexus, Nissan, Ticketmaster, Reuters, major entertainment studios, et al.
From 2003 - 2007, Crowd Favorite was known as King Design with Alex King as the sole human resource. Along the way he became well known for his Open Source community contributions, and in particular, original core contributions to WordPress. King Design grew steadily and became Crowd Favorite in 2007, which over the next six years filled out to 15 full-time employees working out of its Denver location. The company’s longevity speaks to their focus on advancing new technologies and this remains a core tenant today.
In 2007, Karim Marucchi formed VeloMedia as a micro-multinational of distributed offices. In doing so, he came to the table with a rich history in managing large scale web development teams with notable clients including Toshiba, Sony, Qualcomm, Paramount , Dreamworks, Disney, and Nike. In fact, his first web build project was in 1994 for Nissan Corp.
VeloMedia has become a silent giant within the WordPress community, having operated for years without advertising. They have worked with some of the largest and most notable clients in the world, integrating large, complex systems with web technology, and evangelizing conversion to Open Source CMS-based platforms like WordPress. VeloMedia is comprised of offices in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York, Bucharest and Rome, and now gladly adds the Crowd Favorite Denver office to its growing roster, while proudly adopting the Crowd Favorite brand.
Karim, Alex, and their teams have been working closely together since announcing the deal in November. With the acquisition now finalized, the respective crews are already well integrating and Crowd Favorite hits the ground running for a promising, productive and rewarding 2014.
Alex King passed away in 2015.
Alex was one of the original WordPress developers. He helped with what later became the plugin directory and hugely influenced the path to themes.
