Research In Motion has acquired Viigo, a Toronto-based company that has built a platform that makes it easy for publishers and other content companies to develop applications for the BlackBerry platform.
Viigo posted a short statement on its web site today acknowledging that it is now apart of RIM (NSDQ: RIMM). Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Mark Ruddock, Viigo’s CEO wrote: “Our team has joined RIM’s global organization and will continue to bring our expertise in BlackBerry application development and real-time content delivery to the BlackBerry platform.”
The acquisition is smart since increasingly handset sales are tied to how many applications the various platforms have. Frequently, RIM helps partners, such as Facebook and others, to make their BlackBerry applications. It would make sense for BlackBerry to want to acquire any additional tools that would make that process faster or cheaper.
Viigo has its own application that has several different modules that users can pick from like an RSS reader, weather, news, etc. It also has been pitching media companies with an easy way to create an ad-supported application. Customers include Federated Media, Business Wire and others.