MobUI Corp., a mobile application development company dedicated to mobilizing content companies, has acquired Action Engine Corp., a mobile application platform company.

Action Engine's customers include AOL, The Wall Street Journal.com, MarketWatch.com, Barron's.com, MSNBC.com, Sports Illustrated, Golf.com and TiVo. MobUI plans to use Action Engine's patented technology to deliver upon the company's mission to rapidly create iPhone, mobile Web and downloadable applications for major consumer brands.

"With the purchase of Action Engine, MobUI now has the technology necessary to deliver a wide array of advertisements into the applications we build, including text, banner and video, as well as the ability to support multiple click-through actions on these advertisements," said John Burry, Founder and CEO of MobUI, Redmond, WA.

"With new application stores, such the the Apple App Store, Google Android Market and BlackBerry App Center launching every day, the need for companies who can quickly develop and ad-enable mobile applications across a wide variety of phones has never been greater and MobUI is ready to deliver," he said.

The round of funding was led by GlobalNET Mobile Solutions, a wireless application services provider in Latin America.

The terms of the Action Engine acquisition were not announced.

Action Engine services were deployed to millions of global mobile consumers over the course of its nine-year existence.

This included applications built for consumer brand names such as the MSNBC Multimedia on Mobile application and the AOL My Mobile service.

Action Engine claims to be one of the first companies to insert, rotate and track advertisements in the offline screens of downloadable mobile applications.

"This technology will be critical for MobUI as we begin delivering more ad-enabled mobile applications for large companies in the weeks and months ahead," Mr. Burry said.

MobUI speeds time to market by segmenting large mobile projects into separate micro-efforts.

MobUI slices projects into multiple, bite-sized deliveries, which the company claims shortens the mobile development cycle and place prototypes in their customers' hands sooner.

This enables MobUI's content company customers to provide feedback earlier and wireless consumers to experience mobile experiences faster.

MobUI plans to use their acquisition of Action Engine's mobile application development technology to expand their focus beyond iPhone, Android and mobile Web applications to support downloadable BlackBerry, Java, Windows Mobile and BREW powered mobile applications.

The company has secured contracts with three major consumer brands to date and will publicly announce these customers as their mobile applications are deployed in the consumer market.

One of the first MobUI projects to launch will be an iPhone-based chat and social networking tool that the company is building for a large television channel.

MobUI said that this project was one of the major motivating factors behind the acquisition of Action Engine.

"Our client was also using Action Engine for other mobile development and we had built our application to take advantage of features embedded within the Action Engine mobile application platform," Mr. Burry said. "This was a risky approach because we were highly dependent on Action Engine and any instability in Action Engine's server threatened the viability of the project for our client.

"In working with Action Engine we realized that MobUI had the opportunity to purchase Action Engine, which would guarantee the future of the project for our client and give MobUI an exceptional platform for expanding beyond iPhone, Android and mobile Web applications to support a wide array of BlackBerry, Java, BREW and Windows Mobile devices," he said. "We could also would acquire Action Engine's patented technology for inserting, rotating, and tracking mobile advertisements within downloadable applications, a critical tool for speeding time to market and generating revenue for MobUI's customers.

"We jumped at the chance and feel fortunate to have acquired such proven technology for our toolkit."