Nokia buys Plum

My good friend Hans Peter Brondmo just told me that he sold Plum, his start up to Nokia and he is moving from San Francisco to Berlin to run it. Nokia seems to be on a quiet buying spree. They already bought a company I invested in Plazes of Felix Petersen and are looking at many other players in related areas.

Nokia has also made another move that makes sense and is to concentrate social media activities in Berlin. I don´t know if Europe will ever have its Silicon Valley but if it does Berlin will be a contender. It is a fascinating city with a multilingual population in a country that from what I have seen produces the best programmers in Europe and some of the best in the world. Without offending anybody else who works at our company, whenever something really complicated goes wrongly at Fon it is a German programmer who gets us out of the problem. And Berlin is extremely affordable as a city. Living there costs less than in Madrid or any other major European capital. And while the weather sucks if you come from Spain for Nokia´s employees moving South from Helsinki has to be seen as a promotion, at least weather wise.