According to venturebeat Speaking of cool Finnish companies getting sucked by Silicon Valley, you’ll recall the Jaiku was recently bought by Google. Jaiku is like Twitter, in that it lets people post short messages about what they are doing. So why did Google chose Jaiku, instead of the homegrown San Francisco company, Twitter. Jonathan Mulholland says its because Jaiku offers location awareness, and that this fits in with its designs for its Android platform:
…when posting status updates Jaiku has the ability to capture and share the location information (neighbourhood, city, country) of the poster in real time. So in addition to a message post Jaiku can provide real time location awareness of users… And how does Jaiku do this? An integral part of the service is a client application for Symbian S60 platform mobile phones. The client uses location APIs within S60 devices to triangulate the handset (and the users) location based on nearby cellular network towers. The Jaiku client was in fact originally conceived as a ’status aware address book’, and as such integrates into compatible S60 phones to the extent that it also shares the phones (and again the users) status availability (General, In Meeting, Outdoor etc). So in addition to a message post AND location awareness you also have deep mobile integration sufficient to identify the status of a user as well…Jaiku potentially gives Google the Holy Grail – time relevant, location based targeting of information, personalised to a very high degree. Google + Jaiku is not a million miles away from being able to push appropriate advertising to individuals based on their profile, their location and their availability.
