Oracle has purchased the intellectual property assets of mobile application specialist AppForge.

The deal, which had been the subject of growing rumour, was confirmed by an Oracle spokesperson on Wednesday, but no further details were disclosed.

The database giant was believed one of two companies in the running for Georgia-based AppForge, which mysteriously shut down last month.

The deal is expected to broaden Oracle's mobile applications and portal strategy for developers on Microsoft's Visual Studio IDE. It follows Sun Microsystems' purchase of mobile Java specialist SavaJe's intellectual property assets last week.

AppForge, maker of the Crossfire platform for BlackBerry, Palm, Windows PocketPC and Smartphone, Sony Ericsson, Nokia, and Motorola devices had raised $24m in funding from a number of venture capital firms since 2001. ®

Related stories

• Analysis Google promises mobile software platform to challenge Windows (8 June 2007)
• VSLive AppForge 'goes titsup' (28 March 2007)
• PalmSource looks beyond the phone to tablets, players and tools (12 February 2004)
• Nokia prefers Python to Perl for smartphone scripting (21 January 2004)
• Palm, Symbian and Windows apps to spread from Visual Basic source (24 September 2003)
• 3GSM Symbian takes charge at Symbian (28 February 2003)