Nokia sets sail for social networking with Twango acquisition

Nokia Corp. continued to expand beyond mobile into the broader Internet market with the acquisition of Twango Inc., a Redmond, Wash.-based social-networking startup.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Nokia reportedly paid nearly $100 million for the 10-employee company.
Twango-which is not to be confused with Dwango Wireless, a Seattle-area mobile content that tanked last year-allows users to share photos, video clips, audio and other files through a single site. The outfit was founded in 2004 by former managers from Microsoft Corp., and earlier this year launched an XHTML site enabling users to consume media and share files from their phones.
The acquisition may mark Nokia’s riskiest move yet as it expands from handset manufacturing into a cross-platform provider of consumer-facing products and services. The company last year picked up digital music distributor Loudeye Corp. for $60 million as well as gate5, a German developer of location-based technology, for an undisclosed sum.
Twango appears to have gained considerable ground as a one-stop shop for sharing a variety of types of content, but the company competes against a seemingly infinite number of social-networking sites that are beginning to step into mobile. Nokia is betting that Twango’s ability to support multiple types of media on both PCs and handsets can help it close the gap on more established sites such as YouTube, MySpace and Flickr, among others.
“Nokia’s unique vision for social media aligns perfectly with Twango,” said Twango co-founder Jim Laurel. “It’s really exciting to imagine what we can achieve by combining our social media experience with the resources of a company that has played such a major role in shaping the mobile landscape. Now, we will have the resources to deliver on our vision to enable people to capture and enjoy their personal media on mobile devices, desktop computers and in all the other places that are important to them.”