Nokia looking for love in all the wrong Plazes
My plaze or yours?
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Moody Finnish mobe giant Nokia has acquired Plazes, a location-based social networking service, as part of its continuing effort to work out what kind of business it wants to be in.
Plazes is a social-networking-for-the-terminally-lazy service for anyone who wants to share where they are as well as what they're doing. We covered the launch almost exactly a year ago and noted that the company had no income or revenue model; the only hope was to find a way of making money before the bubble burst. And it seems that Nokia is to be the source of that money.
We also noted that the business was crippled by the lack of a mobile client, something the acquisition should address according to the latest entry in the company blog:
"If all goes well, in the near future Plazes will be made available to millions of Nokia customers both online and on millions of mobile devices."
Nokia seems pleased with the acquisition of 13 Berlin-based developers. Niklas Savander, Head of Nokia Services & Software said in a statement: "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."
The Finnish giant isn't saying how much it's paying for Plazes, but hopefully it's less than the cost of recruiting 13 developers, otherwise it's hard to see where the value lies. ®
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COMMENTS
@Tony
Yea, triangulation (or more - quadulation??) using the timing delay on 'old-fashioned' GSM aint a lot of use, but if there's a SMLC (Serving Mobile Location Server) stuck there someplace, it'll get you about 200 metres. Sad, I know if you happen to be in Bradford looking for a curry-house, but a bit better than being declared to be on Sealand...
Looking for love in all the wrong Plazes...
... No fly girls, just ugly faces!
:)
I'll wait and see
This kind of stuff existed on the N95 years ago, but never made much traction due to the lack of mobile devices that actually have GPS on them... if there's only a couple of hundred users in the UK it's not a lot of use.
I wait to see if it works this time. There's still the lack of hardware... cell tower triangulation is fairly useless as (at least in the UK) it only tells you what city you're in - and doesn't even get that right (Google maps thinks I live in the north sea).
Maybe with the iphone it'll hit critical mass and become useful. Worth keeping an eye on.
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