plazes Archive

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.