I received several phone calls yesterday where I was asked about what is happening at Nokia and whether they are buying the Finnish SMS based social intention broadcasting application Zipiko.

The whole thing started when the Zipiko gang shared a taxi from the Nokia House located in Espoo, Finland with Prashant Agarwal, The director of Product Strategy at Fjord.  Prashant Jaikued about it where it was picked up by the Jaiku co-founder Petteri Koponen who proposed that Nokia is about to acquire the small company.

This was enough to start a chain reaction in the Finnish social media and got it really boiling which eventually reached US and at that point it had already crossed over from Jaiku to Twitter. Co-incidentally the Zipiko servers where down just at the time that US was waking up and checking their Twitter feeds for the morning. All this would imply that Zipiko.com had received enough traffic, ignited by the news from the taxi ride, that their servers couldn’t handle it anymore .

Just a week earlier I had been watching Zipiko lead developer’s presentation on Google App Engine that they are using. Knowing that they use the App Engine lets me figure out exactly the amount of traffic that the service received to go down. Google App Engine manages up to 5 million views per month before letting the service go down. Now, that would be a rather remarkable amount of traffic ignited globally by just Jaiku and Twitter messages.

This makes would make a very interesting story if the protagonist herself, the Zipipop* CEO Helene Auramo, wouldn’t have admitted to me that the juicy rumor was just that, a rumor. Also their service was down from some unrelated reason. So it seems that Nokia is not yet going after this Finnish startup.

But the question remains: What did Zipiko do in the Nokia house in the first place?

*Zipiko is an app made by Zipipop and has part of the company working exclusively on it.