Motorola is hoping to enhance the Android smartphone market with the purchase of 280 North. The company includes former Apple employees and is known for its Cappuccino development platform for sophisticated Web-based applications, according to TechCrunch.
“I can confirm that Motorola acquired 280 North earlier this summer,” a company spokesperson said. “The transaction provides Motorola with specialized web-app engineering talent and technology that will help facilitate the continued expansion of Motorola’s application ecosystem.”
280 North’s Francisco Tolmasky came from Apple where he worked on the iPhone team that developed Mobile Safari and Maps, and Ross Boucher was part of the iTunes Store development team when he worked at Apple.
Assuming Motorola can find a way to effectively use the 280 North team, the company could potentially add some compelling Web-based apps to the Android platform, and specifically to its own Android-based Droid smartphones.
Motorola didn’t say how much it paid for 280 North, but the deal is rumored to have cost the company about US$20 million.
1 Comments
Motorola made a good buy here. The only other large Android App Development company I know of is Mutual Mobile http://www.mutualmobile.com
It seems to me that Android devlelopment is going be at least 5 times bigger than iPhone app development.
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