RIM goes for Documents To Go
BlackBerry chalks up another acquisition
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BlackBerry maker RIM has apparently bought out DataViz, publisher of the popular Documents To Go, in a deal worth $50m in cash.
The acquisition is being reported by the Crackberry blog, and while we've not had confirmation from either company CNET says that DataViz has confirmed that "RIM has acquired some of the assets of DataViz and hired the majority of its employees to focus on supporting the BlackBerry platform".
That assertion is backed up by the fact that DataViz employees have been changing their employer details to RIM on the social network that doesn't have Farmville: LinkedIn.
Crackberry reports "multiple sources" confirming the acquisition to have cost RIM $50m in cash. One might imagine that such an acquisiton would require notification to the shareholders, but it's possible that the cash nature of the deal removes that necessity.
Documents To Go achieved its success by getting a viewing-only version pre-installed, initially on Palm devices and later all sorts. Users wanting to edit documents find an easy-upgrade option within the viewer, so have no reason to look elsewhere.
DataViz recently give up supporting WebOS, citing lack of support from Palm, but Documents To Go now runs on all the popular mobile operating systems including RIM's BlackBerry.
And Documents To Go is a reasonable application too: it won't underline your spelling mistakes in red, or count the numer of words you've used, but it can work with native-format documents from Microsoft Office and is available for Android, Windows Mobile and Maemo and iOS as well as BlackBerry - for the moment at least. ®
COMMENTS
Bad news Wednesday
This cannot be good news. The agenda must be to stop supporting rival devices.
Apple Store door slams in 5,4,3,2...
Just kidding Steve!
i expect rest of the company to continue other platforms
i expect RIM bought blackberry part of the company (and some more), to improve RIM software department (+ dataviz as part of bbery solution) but rest of the dataviz will continue to support other platform.
otherwise, they would buy whole dataviz a it would be advertised as such
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