Nokia buys Plum, acquires low hanging fruit
Happy to report more progress in Nokia Service's business development - today we announce the acquisition of Plum. This is a relatively small acquisition (not quite the market-mover that an acquisition of another fruit company would have), but I'm excited about it for a number of reasons.
First, these guys are working on an area that I think is going to become increasingly important - private group social networking. As the mainstream social networks (e.g. Facebook) race to scale, people end up with hundreds or thousands of friends. Posting pictures - or your location - to hundreds of people is basically like doing it publicly, and that's not that interesting for many people. But making a horizontal sharing network also do good small group management is hard, and this is a problem that Plum has been addressing from day 1.
The other main reason I'm delighted is that this is a stellar team that's going to boost our Social Location group. CEO Hans Peter Brondmo is a tech rockstar (and with his black t-shirts and ripped jeans he looks the part too), having founded and sold a number of communications companies, and even written a book. He teamed up with Margaret Olson former CTO of Constant Contact and they put together a very solid team in Boston.
Welcome to Nokia guys!