Research in Motion acquires Waterloo’s TinyHippos, the maker of Ripple

Yesterday, Research in Motion acquired Waterloo-based startup TinyHippos.

The startup is best known for developing Ripple, a mobile environment emulator that RIM, also from Waterloo, seeks to utilize for its BlackBerry platform.

From TinyHippos:

We are extremely excited about our future at RIM and continuing to grow and support Ripple. This is a great step towards our goal of providing a cross-platform mobile application development and testing tool to developers worldwide. 

We also want to reassure all new and existing users that we expect that the Ripple product will continue to be offered for download and the team will continue to develop features, provide support, and help grow the mobile application developer community.

From RIM:

We have been integrating support for web technologies like HTML5 and BlackBerry WebWorks into our developer platform, and working to continually deliver enhanced tools and frameworks to our developer community. We look forward to working with the team at tinyHippos to further provide a simplified and streamlined experience to our developers.

What do you think? A good move for RIM?