Nokia Buys Plazes, a Social Networking Location Aware Site
The world’s top cellphone maker, Nokia, has agreed to buy social networking start-up Plazes as part of its major push into offering Internet services. Plazes provides location-aware services that people can use to plan, record and share their social activities. Nokia did not disclose the value of the deal.
Plazes, based in Berlin, Germany is a service that lets you share your location and leave a brief message — akin to Twitter — about what you’re doing. Your message is placed on a map. In other words, it’s like Twitter, only with the added feature of location tags. Plazes’ most recent version actually integrates Twitter into its service entirely.
Plazes builds a grid of locations using databases and namespaces for locations. Its users have already built a database of hundreds of thousands of locations.
“This acquisition helps Nokia to accelerate its vision of bringing people and places closer together, in line with our broader services strategy,” Niklas Savander, the head of Nokia’s Internet services, said in a statement.
To achieve new growth as the cellphone business is set to mature in coming years Nokia started to invest heavily in building up its presence in Internet service.
The Plazes acquisition also follows by nearly two years Nokia’s pickup of another Berlin-based company, Gate5, which has a strong background in wireless mapping, routing, and navigation software.
Source: ITWeb
Filed under Mobile Technology, Social networking Software