Canadian Mobile Outfit RIM have bought a start-up called tiny Hippos, which is the creator behind the Ripple Mobile Environment Emulator.

TinyHippos pretty much an unknown. According to its website it is designed to provide "tools to help make mobile widget and mobile web development less painful."

The Ripple Mobile Environment Emulator tests HTML5 applications on your web browser as Google Chrome browser extension. It means that developers can avoid the hassle of testing their apps on multiple OS-specific standalone emulators.

As far as RIM is concerned it means that tinyHippos will be adding support for BlackBerry applications to Ripple. RIM is desperate to get more people using its BlackBerry OS. Apple has built its glorious mobile cargo cult on the back of  a huge number of Apps.

There is no news on how much RIM paid for the outfit, but we are expecting the price to have been low in comparison to the cost of drawing in more developers to its software environment.