Motorola snaps up location services firm

US vendor Motorola on Thursday announced that it has acquired a privately held developer of location based software (LBS) known as Aloqa, which has offices in Germany and California.

Naturally, the transaction was for an undisclosed sum and Aloqa will become part of Motorola Mobility, which is comprised of Motorola’s Mobile Devices and Home businesses and is expected to be spun off from Motorola in the first quarter of 2011.

The somewhat resurgent handset vendor owes much of its success to the adoption of the Android platform and has been expanding its development ecosystem, most recently with the acquisition of 280 North.

Aloqa distributes its platform as a mobile application for smartphone operating systems including Android, with an end user base of more than one million. Motorola said it will use Aloqa’s expertise to enhance its MotoBlur UI to connect users and publishers of location-aware content in real-time.

Aloqa’s platform users the user’s context (location, identity and social relationships) to inform them of places, events and other contextual information. For example, if Aloqa’s software recognizes the user is in a certain region, it will offer up the top events of the day or special offers of leading discounters in the vicinity, the company said.