Nokia to acquire Plazes

A couple of minutes ago, we announced an agreement for Nokia to acquire Plazes. What will change for you, the Plazes user? Nothing just yet. We are not going to shut down registration and we are very soon still going to launch what’s now in closed beta. We will continue to listen to and work with our passionate users and developers. And yes, we will even release that iPhone Plazer. It was important to make sure that whoever buys us is actually interested in running and improving the service. So be prepared for some continuous improvements in the months to come.

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. This represents a validation of our concepts and of the resiliance of an excellent development team. We also get the chance to become part of a European tech companies with global reach and with ambition to shape the next generation of web services.

Oh, and what´s worth mentioning: We are based in the great city of Berlin and will be in the future - together with the Berlin based Location based service team from Nokia, our friends from former Berlin-based startup gate5 now called Nokia gate5 GmbH. Go Europe!

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”.

As you can see, we are excited and look forward to build even greater services for our users in the future!

Your Plazes team

This entry was posted on Monday, June 23rd, 2008 at 9:55 am and is filed under Announcements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.