Nokia has announced the acquisition of MetaCarta just after it announced the acquisition of Novarra.
A day before their acquisition announcements they announced the release of a new DRM-Free, legal, unlimited music downloading service called "Comes With Music". The service is only available in China currently with plans to expand to other countries soon.
"Novarra, the Internet Mobility company, provides high performance mobile internet browsers and platforms for operators, handset manufacturers and internet brands to create new services and revenue streams for smartphones, features phones and mobile broadband devices. The solutions deliver a high quality mobile user experience for services including full rich web browsing, search, widgets, apps, video and advertising. Global, commercial deployments over eight years have proven consumer satisfaction, uptake and increased data service revenues."
"MetaCarta Inc. provides powerful technology for finding anything written about any place. MetaCarta unique technology combines geosearch and geotagging capabilities allowing users to find content about a location in internal and external data stores. MetaCarta"s products make data and unstructured content "location-aware" and geographically relevant for easier organization and quicker action."
With these acquisitions Nokia looks to be making a bold statement in the mobile market. They are going to be enhancing their mobile web and location based services in the near future. It should give Apple and the Windows Phone 7 devices a good challenge.
These acquisitions come after the comScore report that Nokia has dropped another .6% to 8.7% share of the mobile phone market while most other manufacturers gained market shares.