Nokia has acquired MetaCarta, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based location services provider.
The move beefs up Nokia’s plans, announced in January, to focus on local navigation services through its Ovi Maps journey-planning application. It wants to offer free navigation on its phones, as well as local applications and services.
MetaCarta has four major products: the MetaCarta Platform, Geographic Data Modules, GeoWeb Applications and Hosted Content Collections.
Its technology combines geosearch and geotagging capabilities allowing users to find content about a location in internal and external data stores.
Its products work with virtually any map server, says the company, including Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and ESRI, and could help Nokia provide a much more comprehensive set of location data.
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“MetaCarta’s products make data and unstructured content ‘location-aware’ and geographically relevant for easier organization and quicker action,” says Nokia.
No financial details were given.