Nokia may no longer be in the business of making smartphones and tablets, but that doesn’t mean it can be crossed off in the mobile race just yet. The sale of its handset business to Microsoft for roughly $7.2 billion left the once-dominant Finnish firm with a largely intact patent portfolio, an active telecommunications equipment business and its HERE location services unit, not to mention plenty of working capital to spend on new initiatives.

Nokia is doing exactly that. The company on Thursday announced the acquisition of Medio Systems, a Seattle-based software developer that focuses on helping brands track their customers across devices to improve monetization The ten-year-old firm fashions itself as the world’s largest pure-play provider of predictive analytics for mobile applications, with about 60 employees throughout 6 countries countries and $30 million in funding from a group of institutional investors that includes early Facebook backer Accel Partners.

Medio offers a suite of complementary products for identifying and acting upon consumer trends that it touts spans the entire analytics lifecycle. The bundle includes an embedded agent companies can bake into their apps to monitor user activity in real-time through cloud-based dashboards that provide visibility into metrics such as location and movement.

Once that data has been ingested, it can be fed into it the firm’s prediction engine to anticipate the best ways to engage specific subsets of customers. Medio provides a recommendation tool, a “marketing command center” and a referral service that allow clients to implement the result of the analysis in their applications.

The technology is a perfect fit with Nokia’s plans for HERE. The company said that the acquisition will enable its mapping division to deliver tailored content to end-users and empower businesses to target shoppers more effectively. That could mean automatically generating a list of nearby restaurants for a person going out for lunch,  creating personalized route recommendations and the list goes on.

The deal is expected to close later this month and comes two just weeks after Nokia announced that it’s buying Desti, a venture-based app maker spun off from Siri developer SRI International that uses natural language processing algorithms to help users find accommodations. No financial details were disclosed for either transaction.

The acquisitions are meant to level the playing field against Google, which dominates the market for location-based services and further cemented its leadership position last June with the purchase of crowdsourced navigation powerhouse Waze.  Nokia is banking on Medio and Desti to help it differentiate with new value-added features, but HERE still has a long way to go before it can truly compete with Google Maps.

photo credit: Vicchi via photopin cc