Rumour has it Research in Motion has acquired DataViz, developers of a document viewing application that has been preloaded on BlackBerry for a couple of years now. The final price was rumoured to be $50 million in cash, an amount small enough to not require disclosure. As a result of the acquisition, DataViz has stopped development on their webOS document viewing app, though they cite issues with the SDK rather than saying anything about getting bought by RIM.
DataViz offers a suite of mobile apps for all of the major Microsoft Office formats: Word to Go, Sheet to Go, Slideshow to Go, and PDF to Go. The free version loaded on most BlackBerrys these days lets you read any files for for PowerPoint, Word, Excel, or Adobe Reader, but you have to shell out some cash for the premium version to do any mobile editing. There are also versions of the software available for iPhone, iPad, Android, and Maemo; whether or not they’ll be discontinued or not is anybody’s guess. I would assume RIM would keep those products running if they want to earn their money back from the acquisition, but Viigo stopped supporting their RSS app for other platforms when RIM acquired them, and obviously Torch Mobile went right to work on the WebKit browser for BlackBerry 6 without looking back at Windows Mobile. QNX is probably focused mostly on the BlackPad these days rather than cars, and aside from integrating with BES, we haven’t heard from Chalk Media in awhile. It’s worth noting that while the Documents to Go suite is DataViz’s biggest product, they also have something called RoadSync, which offers Exchange ActiveSync-enabled push e-mail to Android and Symbian. That’s a specialty RIM can put to good use in their day-to-day business, and perhaps there’s as much value in depriving other platforms of good products as there is in making a buck from selling them.
Given how closely DataViz and RIM have worked since the first preload on the BlackBerry 9000, the acquisition isn’t a huge surprise – I just hope that the app stops being a freemium ploy, and BlackBerrys ship with full document editing on top of the viewing we’ve been enjoying so far.
[via CB]