San Francisco, California - April 1, 2009 - The kingdom of Norway today announced that it will acquire the social networking company Plum for an undisclosed amount. Plum will join forces with Innovation Norway a state owned company with over seven hundred employees with its head office in Norway’s capital Oslo and with offices in all the Norwegian counties and in over thirty countries.
“While Silicon Valley is the world’s hub for tech IPOs and acquisitions, we realize that it is not often that a country makes this kind of strategic technology acquisition” says Norwegian Minister of Trade and Industry Sylvia Brustad. “Norway is in a unique position due to its vast oil and gas reserves and budget surplus. The country has a made a strategic decision to foster technology innovation through strategic investment and acquisitions. Plum is a perfect fit with its founders both having Scandinavian roots, strong Silicon Valley and Boston connections and long track records of innovation and success.”
Plum Groups will be rolled out in Norwegian to every county in the country this fall in order to foster social sharing and collaboration at the grass roots level. Recent reports and criticism in the mainstream media has caused concerns among the Norwegian people and in the government about the broader societal influence of social networking. Plum is attractive due to its focus on privacy and on groups of people who already know each other.
“The Norwegian public were early adopters of the popular Facebook social networking service becoming one of the first places outside the US where Facebook took off” said Hans Peter Brøndmo, co-founder and CEO of Plum. “Norway is killing two birds with one stone with this acquisition. It is offering a more private and family oriented complement to Facebook and it is bringing an innovative social software technology start-up to its home shores”.
Plum will open an office in a new high tech office park in Oslo and Brondmo will move back to Norway and lead Plum from the Oslo office. Margaret Olson, Plum’s CTO and co-founder will spend twenty five percent of her time in Plum’s new headquarters and will lead development teams in Boston, Massachusetts and Oslo, Norway.
While Iceland has been getting a lot of attention recently as a possibly hub for cloud based computing due to its economic woes and green energy sources, Norway has been overlooked in this regard. Given it’s long history as a source of clean, hydroelectric power and cool weather, Norway is a perfect location for cloud based computing. Plum’s cloud based web service will be transitioned from Amazon Web Services to a new Norwegian eco-friendly cloud computing initiative, also sponsored by Innovation Norway, over the next two years.
For existing Plum customers and users there will be no change. This acquisition gives Plum a solid base to continue its innovation and continuing development on its existing product roadmap with a focus on online and mobile social networking for groups.
For more information or questions, please contact Innovation Norway at post@innovasjonnorge.no and Plum at info@plum.com
