Keep it in the family: Plazes acquired by Nokia
Written on June 23, 2008 – 4:02 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
TechCrunch broke the news today: Nokia has acquired Berlin-based Plazes for an undisclosed amount. The service - founded by Felix Petersen - allows its users to track the places, activities and people in their lives. Sounds like Twitter and Jaiku right? But it isn’t completely the same, as the location is Plazes core feature. You don’t have to mention you’re in Berlin, it shows up in a Google map. Updates can be send by SMS or a mobile app (soon also on the iPhone).
Felix Petersen
There’s one other important difference though, while Twitter is U.S.-based and Finnish Jaiku was sucked up by Google, Plazes however, will remain European. Their first financial backing came from European private equity firm Doughty Hanson, which invested €2.7 million. The second round of funding DOES have an American touch to it, as Plazes received €1 million in total from Marc Andreessen (US), Esther Dyson (US), and Martin Varsavsky (Argentina). But that’s all there is. Plazes will stay in Berlin and remain member of the European tech family. And that is good for Europe. Just so you know, Loic Le Meur feels the same about it.
So what will happen next? Most likely, Plazes will become a standard Nokia app - installed on all its phones. Here’s what Felix himself (or his ghost blogger) writes:
The team is very excited to be able to further develop the Plazes service that is online today together with Nokia. 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.
I hope geo localization is ready for its big break-through.
Wanna know how the Plazes office and Felix’ home looks like? Check the MTV Cribs-like video we shot in January.
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[...] first heard of Plazes back in June 2006 from Laurent Haug. The basic idea at the time was to have members report their [...]
[...] With the mobile service industry growing fast thanks to new developments in the hardware and mobile internet access space, Microsoft is evidently looking to expand its services on the Windows Mobile smartphone platform as well as the Windows Live Web services division. The deal also reminds us of another European acquisition earlier this week, with Berlin-based Plazes being snapped up by Nokia. [...]
[...] This perfectly fits into Nokia’s plans to become a service company. To honor this strategy, the Finnish company earlier acquired Navteq ($8.1 billion) and geo localization social network Plazes (undisclosed) [...]