Private company | |
Industry | Media Technology |
Predecessor | BermanBraun (2007-2014) |
Founded | 2014, USA |
Founders | Lloyd Braun |
Headquarters | West Hollywood, California, United States |
Brands | Tested Mom.me Tasted Wonderwall Mandatory Purple Clover |
Website | www |
Whalerock Industries is a West Hollywood-based media and technology company. Its digital brands include the Kardashian/Jenner multimedia apps, Tyler the Creator’s golf media app, Wonderwall, Mom.me, Purple Clover, Moviefone, Cinefix and Tested.
Founded in 2007 by Gail Berman and Lloyd Braun as BermanBraun, the company was relaunched as Whalerock Industries following Berman's exit in January 2014.
BermanBraun's first television production deal was in September 2007, producing a 10-episode order of the American version of the game show Duel for ABC.
MSN partnered with BermanBraun in June 2008 to produce a destination site for MSN aggregating celebrity, entertainment and pop culture news, which launched as Wonderwall in February 2009.
In March 2012, the company acquired Whiskey Media, a San Francisco-based media and technology company founded by CNET founder Shelby Bonnie, adding Web sites Anime Vice, Screened and Tested to its digital portfolio as well as Whiskey's proprietary publishing layer, built on top of the Python-powered Django framework. That same month, Mythbusters co-hosts Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage joined Tested, which also expanded its focus from technology to include subjects such as "science, art, nerd culture and the maker movement".
AOL turned over its moribund Moviefone brand to BermanBraun for a revamp in October 2013. The revamped Moviefone Web site launched in May 2014.
In January 2014, Gail Berman announced she was leaving the company she had co-founded nearly seven years before. Having acquired Berman's share, Lloyd Braun took sole ownership of the company the following month, changing the name from BermanBraun to Whalerock Industries.
Whalerock shut down the Screened Web site in March 2014, redirecting traffic to Moviefone, and shuttered Anime Vice in April 2015.In June 2016, it sold the CineFix brand to Mashable for an undisclosed term