Nokia Acquires Plazes, Geo-based Social Network

Nokia is to acquire Swiss start-up Plazes in a deal which the handset maker says will help it develop location-based social networking. European geo-based companies continue to be a hot commodity, with Nokia announcing June 23 it has acquired Plazes, which develops Web platforms for location sharing and publishing. This is the second “mobile social network” in Europe to be acquired in as many months – Danish startup ZYB was acquired by Vodafone in May for 31.5 million Euro.
The deal allows Nokia 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 and associates to their activities and locations.

Plazes, a privately-owned company of 13 employees founded in 2006, makes 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 of future,” Nokia said in a statement.
Plazes lets “friends” update each other about what they are doing when and where, resulting in a Twitter-like activity stream but with integrated geo-tagging. Users can then subscribe to any of their friends’ activity streams or to groups of friends, as well as to specific locations known as “Plazes”. Updates can be done either on Plazes.com or by mobile phone (via text messaging) or using a number of third-party applications that utilize the Plazes’ publicly available API.

The Plazes service is similar to that of US-based Twitter, which also encourages users to share updates on their location with friends, family and business contacts. Nokia said that the purchase, for an undisclosed sum, is expected to be finalised in the third quarter of this year. Plazes will become part of Nokia’s services and software unit.
Moving forward, it’s clear that mobile, combined with location, represent the next social networking frontier. As evidence, Google’s Android developer contest is littered with location-based social applications, and the official iPhone SDK has already given birth to a number of location-aware social networking apps. What’s not clear yet, however, is whether the eventual winners will be established social networking services such as Facebook or Twitter that add location-based functionality or newer or specialized entrants who build in location and mobile from the get-go.

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