Motorola Buys Location-Based Services Company

Motorola announced the acquisition of Aloqa, a German developer of location-based software and technologies. Aloqa has joined Motorola Mobility, the company’s mobile devices and home businesses division, which is to be spun off in the first quarter of 2011, according to a company release.

Aloqa’s technologies and services detect the user’s context, such as location, identity and social relationships, to inform them proactively of places, events, bargains and other opportunities which they may choose to take up. For example, if Aloqa’s software recognises the user is in a certain region, it will offer them the top events of the day or special offers from registered discounters in the vicinity.

Bringing Context To Motoblur

Aloqa distributes its product as a mobile application for a wide range of smartphone platforms and the company recently claimed that it had passed the million-user milestone.

“Aloqa is an exciting addition to Motorola Mobility as its specialised engineering talent and location-tracking technology will significantly accelerate the release of our context-aware mobile services platform,” said Christy Wyatt, corporate vice president of software and services product management for Motorola Mobility. “Aloqa’s core technologies, user database, and specialised skills are a strong fit with our planned server-side context delivery architecture.”

Wyatt said Aloqa would also further enhance the company’s Motoblur technology which delivers customised content to mobile device home screens. The service allows users to access social networking sites, such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, along with emails, news, apps and widgets, all in one place.

The company said it plans to integrate Motoblur with Aloqa’s open, location-triggered, mobile, push platform to connect users with publishers of location-aware content in real-time.

“We are proud that a global mobile giant like Motorola chose the Aloqa platform as a core part of its future in location technologies,” said Aloqa CEO Sanjeev Agrawal. “Like every startup, we have always dreamed of our technology and product being used by tens of millions of satisfied users everywhere. Being a part of the Motorola Mobility team will help us achieve this goal.”

The company’s ability to integrate with Android may have played a significant role in Motorola’s decision to acquire Aloqa. Motorola’s device division is focused on the Google operating system, a mobility strategy that rewarded the company with increased smartphone sales during the second quarter, despite overall sales falling six percent.

At the beginning of the year, Motorola launched six handsets running the Android operating system and saw shipment totals of 2.3 million smartphones within total sales of 8.5 million handsets. During the second quarter its smartphone tally jumped to 2.7 million units, though the handset count fell to 8.3 million units.

Most notable among its second-quarter launches was the Droid X, an Android smartphone with a 1GHz processor and 4.3-inch display. In addition to this, Motorola also launched the Flipout and the Charm.