RIM Acquires Mobile Storefront Provider Cellmania to Boost its App Business

by venus on August 25th, 2010 4

Blackberry maker RIM has just finished an acquisition spree of Cellmania, the mobile content platform company and application and content storefront provider. The news has been confirmed by companies post on its Web page as well from the Ontario based smartphone maker.

Cellmania currently has a total of 23 customers with eminent names like Sprint Nextel, AT&T, Boost, Virgin Mobile USA, Orange and Telstra in the list. It offers companies a platform called mFinder, that operators can use to accept applications from developers and sell them to users.

“Cellmania’s integrated mFinder™ solution provides infrastructure on either a licensed or hosted basis to allow digital rights management of downloaded content onto mobile phones, subscription billing, time and location based content management and billing integration onto customer bills. Cellmania’s mFinder™ solution is used as a full end-to-end delivery and ecosystem solution for some of the world’s largest mobile operators. Cellmania also provides the world’s largest repository of mobile content consisting of over 200,000 items across 200+ handsets from 100+ countries in 55+ languages,” read the official site.

Cellmania has announced that it will continue to support its current customers.

The move comes as RIM’s effort to strengthen its focus on mobile content and the BlackBerry ecosystem. The company said that Cellmania will bring its “expertise in application storefront development to the BlackBerry platform.” It has only been a week since RIM opened it updated version of its app store. The company is currently facing a tough market competition and is far behind Apple and Android in the app segment, with a total of 9,500 apps in App World.

Cellmania thus comes as a great boost for RIM to help build up its app marketplace with its established infrastructure of both, delivering apps to users and collecting app submissions from developer.