Motorola this morning announced that it has bought Aloqa, a privately-held startup that develops location-based software and technologies designed to enable the discovery of relevant web content by mobile smartphone users.
Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Aloqa was venture-backed; the company raised $1.5 million in Series A funding from multiple angel investors and VC firm Wellington Partners a little over a year ago.
Motorola says it will use Aloqa’s expertise to enhance MOTOBLUR, which delivers customized content to mobile device homescreens, with a context-aware platform and related services.
Aloqa will be folded into Motorola Mobility, which is comprised of Motorola’s Mobile Devices and Home businesses and is expected to be fully spun off from Motorola in the first quarter of 2011. It sounds like all Aloqa employees will be retained.
Christy Wyatt, corporate vice president of software and services product management for Motorola Mobility, had this to say about the acquisition:
Aloqa is an exciting addition to Motorola Mobility as its specialized engineering talent and location-tracking technology will significantly accelerate the release of our context-aware mobile services platform.
Aloqa’s core technologies, user database, and specialized skills are a strong fit with our planned server-side context delivery architecture and will further enhance Motorola’s MOTOBLUR capabilities.
We welcome Aloqa’s highly skilled personnel to the Motorola Mobility team.
Aloqa’s technologies and services utilize the user’s context (location, identity and social relationships) to proactively inform them of places, events, bargains and the like. For example, if Aloqa’s software recognizes the user is in a certain region, it will offer him the top events of the day or special offers of leading discounters in the vicinity.
There’s a demo video on the startup’s homepage if you want to learn more about Aloqa.
Aloqa distributes its product as a mobile application for multiple smartphone platforms, including iOS, Nokia and Android, and it says more than one million users have already downloaded its software.
On a sidenote: Aloqa was led by CEO Sanjeev Agrawal, former Global Head of Google Product Marketing and subsequently VP Products at TellMe Networks (acquired by Microsoft).
Aloqa is a mobile service that proactively notifies users about interesting places, services, events, and people close to where they are. Once you download and start Aloqa, you need to just look at your phone and it shows you live information about interesting things in your vicinity like your favorite coffee shops, highly rated restaurants, local bargains and coupons, Facebook friends in the vicinity, even kid friendly events. When you change locations, Aloqa refreshes itself automatically and notifies you...
Motorola Solutions, Inc. (NYSE: MSI) is a data communications and telecommunications equipment provider that succeeded Motorola Inc. following the spin-off of the mobile phones division into Motorola Mobility Holdings, Inc. in 2011. The company is headquartered in Schaumburg, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. Motorola Solutions is composed of the Enterprise Mobility Solutions division of the former Motorola, Inc. Motorola Solutions also previously had a Networks division, which it sold to Nokia Siemens Networks in a transaction that was completed on April...
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