UPDATED 12:12 EDT / APRIL 27 2011

RIM Acquires Tungle to Round Out their Corporate Social Standing

tungle-me-blackberry-app Research In Motion, the developer of the Blackberry, has acquired Tungle in a move today that fits well with the business-centric mobile company’s past cultural decisions. Tungle.me, which produces social-calendar software, provides a powerful interface for multiple parties to schedule events and meetings together by highlighting overlapping spans of available time. It’s a brilliant tool that interfaces well with both busy corporate meeting society and smartphone culture.

“This is exciting for you too as we expect the Tungle service to only get better,” Tungle wrote on their blog about the acquisition. “Our plan today is what it has always been—for Tungle to become integrated with your daily activities and be ubiquitous within the applications you’re already using. When you think scheduling, Tungle should be at your fingertips.

“As of today, the entire team is joining the ranks of RIM. It’s playoff season and the Tungle team is focusing on putting the puck in the net for you, our customers.”

RIM’s acquisition slots in nicely with their spreading the love from smartphones into tablets. In a series of other acquisitions and attempts to redress their position in the market, the smartphone maker had prepared the PlayBook, their tablet offering priced solidly around $499, using QNX technology. As a result it can enter into the Android app ecosystem and bridge back to RIM’s business-centric offerings at the same time. Late last year, RIM also joined with The Astonishing Tribe—a UI design firm who would give them a leg-up when it came to designing the user experience for the now revealed PlayBook tablet.

As for Tungle, the calendar and scheduling software made its debut into a market already filled with powerful players. Hooking up with RIM will be an important survival move for them.

“Tungle faces some strong competition now from Google itself,” says Mark Hopkins, SiliconANGLE Editor-and-chief, “now that many of the features have been incorporated directly into Google Calendar. If integrated correctly into the RIM suite of tools, though, this could breathe new life into the product.”

This fact is highlighted especially by Google’s recent acquisition of Plannr—a Tungle similar calendar sharing and scheduling service—and quietly merged a lot of the elements into Google Calendar. Currently, Tungle is already available for Blackberry and iPhone, but it’s been loudly absent from Android. By becoming an integrated feature of RIM tablets and smartphones, Tungle can worry less about attempting to beat Google at the calendar game and focus on an already-existing audience of business users who could really use powerful scheduling software that takes advantage of their already business-savvy mobiles.


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