Nokia acquires Twango

Posted by Dennis Sellers Jul 24, 2007 at 11:00am

Nokia has acquired substantially all assets of Twango, which provides a media sharing solution for organizing and sharing photos, videos and other personal media. (See our Jan. 17 review. Terms of the transaction are not being disclosed.

By acquiring Twango, Nokia will be able to offer people an easy way to share multimedia content through their desktop and mobile devices, according to Anssi Vanjoki, executive vice president and General Manager, Multimedia. In addition to key assets, through this transaction Nokia is bringing on a seasoned team with strong social media and web services expertise, Vanjoki adds.

Twango, a privately-owned company founded by former Microsoft veterans, is headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA. Twango’s platform lets you organize, share, and republish media such as photos, videos and audio clips. Twango co-founder, Serena Glover says that “as a result of this acquisition, we will aggressively build out our team in the Seattle area, allowing us to deliver a superior global media sharing service.”

Randy Kerr of Twango told Macsimum that the Twango service will continue to operate without any major interruptions, although there will be some minor changes to their service and policies. “For the foreseeable future Twango’s name will stay,” he says. “As we grow Twango into a more global service we may decide on a name that is more suitable. If, at a future date, the name were to change, our members will be notified in advance.”

Your Twango account ID and upload limits will not be affected at this time; you can upload media and share your media in the same way as you did prior to the acquisition. There have been no

“Certain individual features (in-place online video playback, entering location information, and maps) will be temporarily unavailable for a short period as we make adjustments to the site in the coming weeks,” Kerr says. “Members will be notified when these features are reinstated via the home page, our blog and member emails. As part of the acquisition, we have made one minor change to the Twango privacy policy. This change is to allow Twango data to reside on servers outside the US, in order to accommodate the global nature of our business.”

The Twango team, currently about a dozen, is staying on the east side of Seattle and will ramp up aggressively this year, he adds. A half dozen Nokia veterans will be joining them on site as well. Twango will be hiring various positions in development, operations, customer support.

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