On the 21st of November, the representatives of Nokia announced that a Finnish corporation purchased earthmine inc. completely. The Finish giant got access to earthmine’s 3D street-level imaging technology and company’s database. The company will use earthmine in Here, a mapping service of Nokia. Earthmine team is expected to join Location and Commerce business division of Nokia in full numbers. To note, the specialist expected that Nokia should complete the acquisition of earthmine by the end of . The details of the deal are kept under wraps.
It is clear that Nokia were looking forward to purchasing earthmine and getting hands on its processing and reality capture technologies. Currently, Nokia is pushing the envelope with its freshly rebranded maps called Here. Being a decent rival to Google Earth and Street View, Here will compete with them even better after the acquisition of earthmine. Meanwhile, Nokia launched Here on the iTunes Store on the 20th of November. It is clear that the company does everything possible to offer the Apple fans an alternative to ‘raw’ Apple Maps. However, the iOS version of Here does not support 3D capabilities of earthmine, and it is no data on when the upgrade will be in place.
The acquisition of earthmine by Nokia was officially announced last week. John Ristevski, who is a co-CEO of earthmine inc., said that he and the team would love to collaborate with Nokia, a company with a world-wide presence and huge efforts in mapping. He stressed that Nokia was a better place to index the world in 3D, the place where Earthmine team would be able to fulfill its mission.