Nokia acquires social networking site Plazes

Plazes (http://www.plazes.com/) provides location-aware services that people can use to plan, record, and share their social activities.

Nokia did not disclose the value of the deal with the company, which has a staff of 13 and its main operations in Berlin.

"This acquisition helps Nokia to accelerate its vision of bringing people and places closer together, in line with our broader services strategy," Niklas Savander, the head of Nokia's Internet services, said in a statement.

Plazes also links to services like Twitter which provide instant-messaging tools for Web and mobile phone users to keep track of their friends' daily activities.

"Their key know-how is in the social networking ... We can develop that for our Nokia Maps service," Kari Tuutti, a Nokia spokesman, said.

"Our whole Ovi strategy is based on creating open links to all popular social networking sites," he said.