Nokia announced Friday it has purchased MetaCarta, a Cambridge, Mass.-based company that offers “geographic intelligence” solutions. The world's largest handset maker said it will use MetaCarta's technology to add functionality in local searches on its devices.

The purchase price for the privately held company wasn't announced. MetaCarta said its technology is used for “finding anything written about any place,” by combining geosearch and geotagging capabilities in order to make data and unstructured content location-aware and “geographically relevant.”
Founded in 2001, MetaCarta offers products and services that connect various kinds of content to maps through its platform, geographic data modules, geoweb applications, and hosted content collections.
The company has been cited in KMWorld's 100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management and in Red Herring's Top 100 Private Companies.
According to his company bio, Chief Technology Officer John Frank founded the company when, during research at M.I.T. on microclimates in forests, he needed a different way to view documents based on geography.
The company's NewsMap is a hosted map mash-up that allows publishers, such as newspapers, to dynamically display locations of places mentioned in articles.
(Source: Newsfactor.com)