Research In Motion, maker of the popular BlackBerry smartphones, has added another company to its list of acquisitions. RIM acquired Toronto, Canada-based Viigo, the creator of the popular software application Viigo for BlackBerry, one year after acquiring encryption supplier Certicom.
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Research In Motion, based in Waterloo, Canada, hasn’t released details of the acquisition. Viigo, however, broke the news on its web site late Friday.
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Viigo is excited to announce that our company is now part of Research In Motion, wrote CEO Mark Ruddock. To the Viigo team — a very special thanks to all of you for helping to build such an exciting product and a wonderful company. We’ve arrived at this point today because of you.
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As part of RIM, Ruddock said Viigo will continue to plug away at BlackBerry application development and real-time content delivery.
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subheadBeyond Business/subhead
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RIM, founded in 1985, had its greatest success when it launched its first BlackBerry phones in 1999. Executives at the company set an aggressive path for RIM’s BlackBerrys, which in the early years competed for the attention of business professionals. Six years after successfully launching BlackBerry, however, RIM paid $612.5 million to settle a patent dispute with Virginia-based NTP. The payout avoided the possible closure of its service and enabled RIM to stay in the game.
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Hanging on paid off. A decade after first launching BlackBerry, RIM has sold more than 50 million BlackBerry devices and expanded from selling to professional businesspersons to average mobile-phone users.
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Now RIM plans to hold on to that success with the addition of Viigo.
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While Viigo already has a relationship with RIM through its software for BlackBerry, it isn’t clear whether Viigo will continue to offer its software to RIM competitors such as HTC. Viigo currently provides its software on smartphones running Windows Mobile, including the HTC Snap, HTC…