Nokia and Plazes today announced an agreement for Nokia to acquire substantially all assets of Plazes, a privately-owned start-up company of 13 people with its principal operations in Berlin. Plazes provides a context-aware social-activity service that people can use to plan, record, and share their social activities: why they are at a given location at a given time, whether in the past, present or future.

“This acquisition helps Nokia to accelerate its vision of bringing people and places closer together, in line with our broader services strategy,” said Niklas Savander, Head of Nokia Services & Software. “In addition to the key assets, through this acquisition Nokia will bring on a visionary team with an advanced understanding of social-activity services, as well as the technical ability to further develop this area.”

By acquiring Plazes, Nokia will be able to extend its context-based service offering with social presence and time-based activity planning features. Plazes adds the elements of “place” and “time” to social networking through features that allow people to alert friends of their activity and location; review their own and others’ past activities; share their experiences and make plans with friends, who are then able to respond
with comments and suggestions as well as their own location information.

“Nokia shares our vision of the social activity space and of how we can together develop the service that Plazes provides today,” said Felix Petersen, co-founder of Plazes. “We feel proud of what the Plazes team has
achieved so far with its pioneering work in context-aware services and we feel even more excited about what’s to come next.”

The agreement is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close in the third quarter 2008. After closing, Plazes will become part of Nokia’s Services & Software unit.

Here’s more on the acquisition from the Plazes blog.

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Discovered by the creators of the popular ZiPhone jailbreak and unlocking utility, a small, nondescript entry in the new firmware used to identify the phone’s chipset refers to a device known as “SGOLD3.”

Sleuthing reveals this to be an Infineon chipset, the SGOLD3H (PDF), which both supplies the baseband for cellular data on GSM phones and serves equally as a general application accelerator and an audiovisual processor.

The iPhone currently uses a predecessor of the chipset, the SGOLD2, to drive its communication link.

However, the new chipset is distinguished from this earlier hardware (also listed in the iPhone firmware) for its 3G cellular data access. Unlike the EDGE-only chipset from the current Apple handset, the new Infineon hardware not only adds 3G over HSDPA but runs up to the international standard’s newer 7.2 megabit per second spec — twice the speed of the 3.6-megabit access seen on most HSDPA networks.

It also supports WCDMA, a related 3G technology needed for countries such as Japan and Korea, where the GSM service used by Europe and North America is rare to non-existent. Analysts have already warned that Apple’s planned expansion into Asia this year will demand 3G.

However, the chipset doesn’t take full advantage of AT&T’s planned 3G expansion this year. The exclusive home of the iPhone in the US is currently upgrading to HSUPA, an improvement over HSDPA that dramatically improves upload speeds. The Infineon chipset provides faster downloads than normal HSDPA but doesn’t address upstream connections beyond what’s already provided in the older 3G standard.

Still, the newly discovered hardware references all but confirm the dependence of a 3G iPhone launch on Apple’s firmware overhaul, which is officially scheduled to debut sometime in June. It also corroborates past claims by analysts that predicted an Infineon chip at the heart of an iPhone upgrade due in mid-year.

The introduction of a 3G iPhone is considered essential not just to the delivery of the iPhone to more areas but also to deliver services over cellular networks that typically suffer over slower EDGE connections, such as large downloads from the upcoming App Store.

Infineon’s processor also enables new options for video that aren’t present in the SGOLD2, such as live recording and two-way video calls, though only unverified rumors have so far suggested that Apple will add a front camera and video chats to the iPhone’s feature set.