Location social software company Plazes has been acquired by Nokia. I'm an advisor to the Berlin-based startup and really happy for the team. Nokia is a customer of ours and through many trips to Helsinki have gotten a good feel for the culture. TechCrunch notes the synergy with Navteq, Brady Forrest notes how they will augment their Ovi portal. Should be a good fit, especially as Nokia transforms to an internet company.
The Plazes team takes pride in being one of the first services in the location-context arena. When we started in 2005 the potential of that space might have been obvious but it was an uphill battle nevertheless with so many concepts gone sour before. We build the first service moonlighting. A year later we were honored to bring some of the smartest people on the web on board as our angel investors. A year later we got enough traction to bring more great investors on board. Now in 2008 we feel that it is time to take Plazes mainstream and really start making a difference for a larger group of users.
Nokia is a perfect partner for us because they share our product vision and have the muscle to bring locative presence to hundreds of millions of people all over the world. What better partner than Nokia for exploring innovative ways of “connecting people”.
