Motorola joined in the slew of acquisitions today by buying 280 North giving it access to a programming platform known as Cappuccino that simplifies creating deeper web apps. Although not confirmed yet, Motorola reportedly paid approximately $20 million dollar for 280 North. In this world of billion-dollar acquisitions, this acquisition is relatively a small deal, but we believe it’s interesting for a Motorola to stand out of the crowd of Android Applications and foster the Android ecosystem.

280 North was founded by a pair of past Apple employees who have worked as one of the early members of the team that created MobileSafari, iTunes and Maps on the iPhone. The company has created a programming language Objective-J and and an open source framework Cappuccino which makes it easy to build desktop-caliber applications that run in a web browser.

In an email, Motorola spokesperson released the following statement regarding the acquisition:

I can confirm that Motorola acquired 280 North earlier this summer. The transaction provides Motorola with specialized web-app engineering talent and technology that will help facilitate the continued expansion of Motorola’s application ecosystem. We believe 280 North will be instrumental in helping us continue to foster the Android ecosystem with innovative web-based technologies and applications. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.