Nokia Boosts Mobile Social Networking Platform

Nokia has announced plans to acquire substantially all assets of Plazes, a privately-owned start-up company of 13 people with its principal operations in Germany. Plazes provides a context-aware social-activity service that people can use to plan, record, and share their social activities: why they are at a given location at a given time, whether in the past, present or future.

"This acquisition helps Nokia to accelerate its vision of bringing people and places closer together, in line with our broader services strategy," said Niklas Savander, Head of Nokia Services & Software. "In addition to the key assets, through this acquisition Nokia will bring on a visionary team with an advanced understanding of social-activity services, as well as the technical ability to further develop this area."

By acquiring Plazes, Nokia says that it will be able to extend its context-based service offering with social presence and time-based activity planning features. Plazes adds the elements of "place" and "time" to social networking through features that allow people to alert friends of their activity and location; review their own and others' past activities; share their experiences and make plans with friends, who are then able to respond with comments and suggestions as well as their own location information.

"Nokia shares our vision of the social activity space and of how we can together develop the service that Plazes provides today," said Felix Petersen, co-founder of Plazes. "We feel proud of what the Plazes team has achieved so far with its pioneering work in context-aware services and we feel even more excited about what's to come next."

The agreement is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close in the third quarter 2008. After closing, Plazes will become part of Nokia's Services & Software unit.

Posted to the site on 23rd June 2008