Hank Skorny

RealNetworks today announced a new hire that's notable both because of the person taking the job and because there's a bit of a mystery around the job he's taking. The company named Hank Skorny to the newly created position of "Senior Vice President, Media Cloud Computing and Services."

Skorny is a well-known entrepreneur who founded Thumbspeeed, a Bellevue-based mobile messaging company that was acquired in 2007 by OZ Communications, which was subsequently bought by Nokia. He has worked for companies ranging from Infospace Mobile and AOL Mobile to Adobe, Microsoft and Apple. RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser gave Skorny high praise in a news release announcing his appointment -- calling him "one of the great innovators in the PC, Internet, and mobile industries" over the past 25 years.

So what is this new position that Skorny is taking at Real? By way of explanation, the news release offers only a cryptic quote from Glaser calling it a new effort "to build an innovative set of products and services that leverage cloud computing to make digital media available to consumers whenever and wherever they want it."

OK, so that sounds interesting, if it actually lives up to the promise of being "innovative." So what is this innovative new initiative exactly? RealNetworks spokesman Bill Hankes said the company wasn't yet providing further details. Hankes pointed out that cloud computing isn't completely foreign to RealNetworks, if you consider the Rhapsody music service a cloud-based offering.

Of course, music subscription services by themselves aren't exactly cutting-edge in late 2009, so there's got to be a lot more to it than that. Given his background, it should be interesting to see what Skorny comes up with, and to see what qualifies as innovation in the eyes of the RealNetworks CEO these days.

Update: A very nice catch by "Blog Reader" in the comments: Here's a RealNetworks job listing saying that the "media Cloud team" at the company "is building a product and service that will provide the casual user the ability to backup their most prized content (Photos, Music, etc) and access that content on their computer, mobile device or living room device."

Mystery solved, apparently. That's an interesting move by the company, into what would seem like a relatively crowded space, unless it can differentiate itself by putting a pretty unique spin on the whole backup/synchronization thing.

Earlier: RealNetworks ekes out profit; Rhapsody numbers are down