Nokia Acquires MetaCarta: Analysis

Why did Nokia acquire MetaCarta? Adena Schutzberg and I offer several suggestions:

• Search: In the mobile world of Nokia, every search has context and location is a key component
• Location-based advertising: Everyone is searching for the tool that makes the advertising relevant to the mobile user. This could be it.
• Location-based gaming and networking: You could certainly run MetaCarta in the back-end of a game for people looking for their friends and the MetaCarta engine can pinpoint location, again given the appropriate context of other SMS services.

Perhaps the bigger question is, "Did a big time publisher like Reuters or Bloomberg miss the boat?" Adena suggests that it would have been a perfect fit for Thompson Reuter’s Calais, a platform for enhancing search and navigation for online publishers. My take is that publishers still don’t get the importance of location for context-relevant, semantic queries. Likewise, why didn’t Google or Microsoft consider MetaCarta’s technology? Did they also miss an opportunity to cement location into search?