With the news now official that Nokia has accquired Dopplr Oy, the company behind the social media atlas site Dopplr, the Finnish company has added yet another small niche service to their diverse range of companies. Dopplr (which allows users to say where they are travelling and see who lives there or is visiting at the same time, allowing for more serendipitous connections to be made) joins services such as Plum and Plazes in Nokia's store chest. Why?
Read on in the full article.
Any MBA grads want to have a crack at answering Ewan's question. There are a numbe of possible reasons to be aquisitive, I suspect a big boys hedging strategy.
Nokia bought company full of ex-Nokia employees. �Nice 15 million "get-back-from-holiday" bonus.
"Are Nokia buying their way into the software market? I'm sure some will think that this is a substitute for doing the work themselves"
I don't see why that's something that would be sneered at. Most startups' entire business models are based around being acquired before they run out of money!
Signed into Dopplr and it is very obvious why Nokia bought them... they know how to leverage data in a commercial fashion. Nokia has been criticized as not being able to monitize services ( can you say Ovi Share). This is a google play where the data is worth much more then the service.
Funny to see this, I used to work and socialise with Dopplr's CTO Matt Biddulph at the BBC when I was in interactive TV and he was doing a variety of projects internally for them. Good work with all this, though I disagreed with his choice of Ruby on Rails as the underlying platform for Dopplr, PHP is far more powerful.