Nokia to acquire German address book vendor Cellity

The world's leading maker of mobile devices, Nokia will acquire German address book vendor Cellity, for an undisclosed sum, to strengthen its position in the social networking platform. It hopes to close the deal before the end of the third quarter of this year.

Hamburg-based Cellity, a privately owned mobile software company with 14 employees for an undisclosed sum.

Cellity's main product is the innovative Address book 2.0 tool, which enables all contact data to be imported from a wide variety of sources such as cellphone address books, Outlook, Twitter and social networks to one place.

Users can access the complete feature set from the Cellity Communicator 2.0 interface, including conventional telephony, short text messaging, sending emails from their cellphone, free messaging, Twitter updates, communication with social networks and phone conferencing.

The Cellity Communicator 2.0 can be used on any cellphone or web browser and keeps data dependably secure and synchronized.

Nokia said that it will acquire the Cellity team to strengthen its competencies in the area of social networking. It added that Cellity's current service will not transfer to Nokia and the service will be discontinued from 30 September 2009.