The Finish mobile phone company has announced that it acquired Plazes, a Berlin based social networking site which focuses on location tracking applications. Plazes will become part of Nokia’s Service and Software unit.

Plazes is the second Berlin based company to be bought by Nokia, who did the same thing in 2006 with Gate5. A few months later, the service that the company offered was turned into Nokia Maps, with which the mobile phone producer wants to attack Google Maps.
 
Plazes’ service is focused on finding the precise location of each of the members of a group of friends, and is still in a beta version, even though the company was founded in 2005.

The deal is very helpful to the German company because the location based networking sites’ success has become more and more uncertain recently, with a lot of promising applications not managing to make it on the market in the end. It seems that Nokia’s takeover of Gate5 and the success that the company had after the acquisition played an important role in Plazes deciding to go for the deal.

Nokia will most probably integrate the company’s services to its mobile applications, consolidating its position on the location aware mobile phones market.

According to Reuters, Niklas  Savander, Nokia’s Internet Services unit’s head, said that "This acquisition helps Nokia to accelerate its vision of bringing people and places closer together, in line with our broader services strategy."

The sum for which the takeover took place has not been disclosed.