Another Social Software Acquisition in the Mobile World
Today, Nokia announced that it will be acquiring Plazes, a social software company. Plazes allows members to post their activites and location from a pc, mobile, phone, or sms. I would call this multi-channle service a more advaced form of Twitter. Plazes has become more popular in Europe.
The goal is to make Plazes available to millions of Nokia customers. I am sure the business case showed potential high dollars in advertisment and also cell phone charges.
The power of a mobile social network will be the location connection. Nokia expects over 400 million devices to be GPS enabled. This will allow for location based advertisment, which becomes a very powerful tool for advertisers.
Vodafone was the other company to recently acquire a social software company. They acuaried ZYB, a Danish company.
The market is hot and growing for social software. As stated in my previous blog: The Future Market Opportunity for Mobile Social Networking, the mobile entertainment market is supposted to grow by 36% and recahc $80 billion by 2011.
It will be very interesting to see what social networks become dominant, like Facebook and Myspace on the mobile phones.
Tags: Acquisition, Facebook, Myspace, Nokia, Plazes, Social Software, Vodaphone, ZYB