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Plazes Acquired By Nokia
Zurich and Berlin-based location sharing tool Plazes has been acquired by Nokia. Plazes has 13 employees and the deal is expected to close in the 3rd quarter. After closing, Plazes will become part of Nokia’s Services & Software unit. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Plazes notes, "in the near future plazes will be made available to millions of Nokia customers both online and on millions of mobile devices." One of my close friends worked with Plazes for a while and during a trip to Berlin in 2006, everywhere we went I heard, "we must enter this location on Plazes". I never found the service that beneficial and overall I found the buzz slowly dying over the past 18 months. It seems like Dopplr has taken over the buzz from Plazes.
Brady from O’Reilly Radar says that Plazes will be used to provide Nokia with a social mapping application for its new portal, Ovi. More details on the acquisition on the Plazes blog.
Last year Nokia acquired file sharing service Twango and has been pushing mobile advertising recently.
In regard to your Dopplr vs. plazes comment - not sure if you have really reviewed both apps, since I see a misunderstanding. Point taken - Dopplr and plazes are in the “location-space”, but they are not the same application.
While you plan trips on Dopplr and it’s all bound to, “I am in City X from date to date”, Plazes is more about the activity - for example, “I am doing X @ plaze Y”. On top of that, plazes also allows you to schedule all your events, meetings whatever and use it as a calendar app.
Plazes in general is far more detailed on activities and what is going on around you. Like, when people use the mobile app (or text message) you can actually find out where they are and what they are doing, which is what 80+% of all phone conversations is about anyway.
What I find particulary interesting is, is that you also get a history of your travels - and not just on the city level (e.g. from 08/03/05 until 08/03/10, I was in Berlin), but also as in, “yesterday I went to Prospect Park in Brooklyn, then I went to a bar 4 blocks from there and back home to Manhattan, today I went down to the Seaport in the Financial District”.
Now I have no grudge against Dopplr (I use it also since I am a geo-location junkie), it just got different features. Like you put in a trip, select train, airplane or car, calculate your carbon totals and just see where contacts are at. You don’t see if Allen hangs out at a bar in Brooklyn tonight, you just see that he is in New York.
Now plazes and Dopplr are both useful to me, and I wish they would integrate with one another, and I wish more people would use it because that component is what makes it really valuable and creates -the- use case.
On top of that both could go in bed with Yelp and/or Qype to make me even happier.