Is Navteq just the beginning?

If anyone was still thinking Nokia's Ovi strategy was a joke, then Nokia just plopped $8.1 billion on the table to quell any doubts. Navteq is no small acquisition. That kind of money resembles more than one of the private equity buyouts of late rather than a vendor adding to its technology portfolio.

It also shows that Nokia's new Web services strategy isn't just Club Nokia reborn. Nokia's not talking about ringtones and wallpapers, it's aiming to control the value chain from handset to content sale as well as the enabling technology that powers each transaction in between.

The question is whether Nokia plans to stop with Navteq. Unlike its previous acquisitions of companies such as Enpocket and Loudeye, Nokia isn't just gaining a key technology for its growing service portfolio. Navteq is the leading company in supplying mapping data that powers not only Nokia's own navigation and location-based applications, but those of the vehicle and handheld navigation, fleet tracking and Web-mapping industries.

Nokia not only acquired the primary source of data for its own location-based services, it acquired a massive customer base that includes the likes of Garmin, Google, Mapquest and OnStar, as well as its wireless operator customers and handset competitors.

If Nokia is now the largest provider of mapping data in the world, does that mean it has ambitions of being the largest provider of other critical Web services or applications? Its options are perhaps a bit more limited in that regard. Nokia may have funds, but it certainly won't be buying Google to become a leader in Web search or Apple to dominate the digital music market. But Navteq shows that Nokia is not only in the market for technology, it's in the market for customers, market share and influence.

Maybe it will add to the Loudeye music platform by buying a customer-facing music service like eMusic or Napster. Maybe Enpocket is just its first venture into the advertising world. We may not know what Nokia's next move is, but the Finnish phone-maker certainly isn't thinking small anymore.