Nokia buys media-sharing site Twango

Twango's home page.

(Credit: Twango)

Media-sharing site Twango updated its Web site on Monday to announce that it's been chomped up by cell phone manufacturer Nokia. With its cool new toy, Nokia hopes to make it easier for handset owners to share multimedia content among desktop, Web, and mobile platforms.

"The Twango acquisition is a concrete step towards our consumer Internet services vision of providing seamless access to information, entertainment, and social networks--at any time, anywhere, from any connected device, in any way that you choose," said Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia's executive vice president and general manager of multimedia at Nokia, in a joint statement We have the most complete suite of connected multimedia experiences including music, navigation, games, and--with the Twango acquisition--photos, videos, and a variety of document types."

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

A sexy Nokia N95

(Credit: Nokia)

I played around with a Twango account for a bit after testing it out when the Redmond, Wash.-based start-up (yes, it was founded by Microsoft alums) came to the DigitalLife trade show in New York last October. It's sort of like a mix between Flickr and multimedia "channel" creator Kyte.tv, facilitating the storage and sharing of a variety of media types and allowing them to be organized into "channels." To be honest, the structure of the site confused me somewhat (are "channels" like Flickr "albums" but with audio and video too?) Then again, I also can't seem to wrap my head around all those fancy Nokia N-series handsets that you can play with at the company's nightclub-like flagship store in midtown Manhattan.

But the match makes sense: it's clear that both companies pursue a strategy that focuses on the ultra-functional, the feature-heavy, and the if-it-counts-as-media-we'll-help-you-share-it mentality. It's unlikely that this acquisition will affect a whole lot of people who aren't Nokia customers (and it's not yet very clear as to how Twango itself will change) but it'll be interesting to see how this affects mobile media-sharing.

[eskimo24]

Hmmm... Twango, hm? With all these social-network-next-generation websites and applications on the rise, it's hard to keep track of them all! And even more so, which one to support!<br /><br />Though I actually use Kyte.tv for my video-blogging purposes. I haven't used Flickr much, but I can understand what you're getting at here, so hopefully my 2 cents can steer you in the right direction and relieve the confusion! Think of Kyte.tv as well, a TV! :) So TVs have different channels and each channel features different shows. For instance: Fox has the news and day time talk shows. And HBO has movies. This is how I like to describe Kyte to my friends. When producing shows, you have options such as photo, photo slideshow, video upload, web cam, and audio recording, among other features. These can be used on their own, or in a combination, with each show. So in this sense, yes, it's like "albums" in Flickr -- only a whole lot more options for creativity :) Much easier and organized vs. uploading your pictures and videos onto a website and using the search engine to find it! Just search for the channel name and it's all right there!