Motorola buys 280 North, created by former Apple engineers

27th August, 2010 by adina
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Motorola has recently made a new acquisition by buying 280 North. The deal is rumored to cost about $20 million and gives Motorola access to a programming platform called Cappuccino, which simplifies creating deeper web applications. A company’s representative declared for “TechCrunch” that this deal would be effective in fostering the Android ecosystem through web-based technology and applications.

The recent deal will most probably have an effect on the Blur UI, which supports most of the phone maker’s smartphone. Even if it has played a smaller role in the past months, it is considered as being instrumental to both the Droid X and Droid 2 and offers owners a slew of information and control widgets. In order to differentiate themselves, companies such as Motorola have often tried to veer away from the initial Android platform, but many of these have held back the experience rather than being of any help.

As 280 North brings a pair of former, but influential Apple employees, the staff behind the small company may represent a minor achievement too. Francisco Tolmasky, the interface designer, was earlier involved in the iPhone team and also helped develop both Safari and Maps. Ross Boucher, the server coder, has also been working with Apple in developing recommendation, charting and search engines for the iTunes Store. Objective-J, 280 North’s in-house name for Cappuccino, is a direct nod to the Objective-C language, which is at the root of Cocoa programming for both iOS and Mac OS X.


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