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!
Nokia acquires Cellity to accelerate social networking
The recently announced acquisition of German startup Cellity was completed today. Good news for Nokia as it takes us towards a goal we have had for a while - getting more out of the most important social network that you own (ie the contacts book on your phone) by connecting it with the new breed of social networks that are today better at leveraging the many faceted advantages of the web as a platform.
Welcome the @cellity team, and congrats to my colleague Ed (@simnett) and the team, who disproved that myth that nothing gets done in July.