ReadWriteWeb

Today at BlackBerry World in Orlando, FL RIM announced it will add support for managing Android and iOS devices to its BlackBerry Enterprise Server platform. The technology will come from RIM's pending acquisition of ubitexx, which was announced today.

RIM also announced the availability of Gist for BlackBerry. RIM acquired Gist in February. Importantly, it looks like Gist will still be available for other platforms, which was a concern for some users.

These moves imply that RIM is finally moving towards a multi-platform approach to development.

Once you've added x-ray vision to your email inbox, you'll never go back to life without it. The latest service to offer just that is Xobni, a high-profile startup that brought its Outlook plug-in out of Beta status a year ago next week. Today Xobni comes to Gmail and it looks really nice. The first 100 ReadWriteWeb readers who visit this link and enter the code XOBNI-RWW will be provided access to it. The company says iPhone and Android versions will open for testing within 90 days.

Xobni competes with Rapportive (my favorite to date) and Gist, which was recently acquired by Blackberry company RIM. Another service called eTacts (site now down) was recently acquired by Salesforce. Xobni was funded by Blackberry Partners a year ago, but remains independent. Check out the screenshot below to get a feel for how it looks, what it offers and how it's different.

As we've said before, consolidation is a watch-word for 2011. Every week we're seeing acquisitions in the cloud, data analysis and enterprise social software market. We've already covered one of this week's biggest announcements: RIM's acquisition of Gist. Here are three more acquisitions worth taking note of.

You've got a meeting in 15 minutes. You know who else is going to be there, but imagine whipping out your phone to get more context: what have the other meeting attendees posted this morning on Twitter, what have they written on their blogs, what were the last email threads you were on with them and what events did you last attend together?

Research in Motion, the parent company behind the Blackberry business smartphone, is betting that its customers (and would-be customers) would like to be shown this kind of information about their contacts quickly and easily. That's why the company has acquired Gist, a Seattle-based startup that provides just such a service.

Etacts, an email add-on that layers social network profiles, conversation history and other relationship management information on top of your email conversations, announced abruptly this morning that it is shutting down its service, deleting all customer data at the end of next month and has "decided to pursue other opportunities."

Having raised more than a half million dollars from some of the hottest investors in Silicon Valley just over six months ago, it's unlikely the Etacts team has decided to go do something unrelated. It is most likely the company has been acquired by a larger firm that does heavy business in email. The Inbox 2.0 market has long been expected to heat up and indeed it has. Etacts competitor Rapportive also recently drew big name funding, Gist is rumored to be in acquisition talks with RIM and now Etacts announces a mysterious shut-down. Update: See our subsequent coverage, it appears to be Salesforce that has acquired Etacts.

The cloud fundamentally changes the way enterprise applications function. Increasingly we are seeing traditional enterprise applications emerge in the cloud and partner with other Web-based services that have consumer appeal.

In turn, we are seeing cloud-based consumer type services transform into enterprise grade offerings that provide customers with the same experience they get in their work as they do at home.

Gist is a new service that tracks your contact lists from email and social networks, prioritizes them and helps you quickly view what those people have been up to across blogs, Twitter and elsewhere. The company just released an iPhone app this morning (iTunes link) and what more could you ask for? Instant context for people you're just about to call, meet with or have on your mind?

Unfortunately, the service doesn't work very well yet. The social web is a mess of disconnected identity and activity data; cleaning it all up, tying it together and delivering it on the fly to your phone is an ambitious goal, but that's one of the things Gist is trying to do.