At same time that it announced an offer to acquire the remaining shares of Symbian Limited that it does not already own, and one day after it announced the acquisition of Plazes, Nokia teamed up with Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT DOCOMO to announce the formation of the Symbian Foundation.

The Symbian Foundation brings together technologies from all four companies (and other member companies) to provide an open (source) mobile software platform that will be released under the Eclipse Public License (EPL) 1.0.
The Symbian Foundation is an obvious counter to the Android Foundation, another open source mobile platform led by Google, Inc.

The Android platform, a Linux-based platform, has hugged the headlines since it was announced late last year, but no publicly available device has been released for the platform yet. NTT DOCOMO is also a founding member of the Android Foundation, and has plans to release Android devices next year.

Nokia, which announced an agreement to acquire Plazes yesterday, has made another acquisition announcement. In this latest acquisition attempt, Nokia, which already owns about 45% of Symbian Limited, made a “cash offer to acquire all of the shares of Symbian Limited that Nokia does not already own”.

Nokia, the mobile phone giant, has announced an agreement to acquire Plazes AG. Plazes AG, based in Zurich, Switzerland, operates Plazes.com, which is a social networking website that allows its members to “update their location through their laptop or mobile phone, and update their online presence with their current, past and future whereabouts”.