The press release is not very detailed but says the agreement is Infoterra France "to provide them with a unique image processing technology that will be employed in particular to process geographic images. This technology inherits from more than 15 years of Infoterra France experience in the domain, having led to world class products such as the Pixel Factory." Among other things the company "offers a wide range of products featuring a combination of true orthophotos and highly detailed 3D models that are setting new standard in the GIS industry." So, this could be another piece in "the building a 3D world" puzzle.

Brian J.L. Berry, dean of the UT Dallas School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences received the Walter Isard Award for Scholarly Achievement from the North American Regional Science Council annually at its conference last week.

Who? You may well ask. "His work helped precipitate a 'quantitative revolution' in geography, led by new forms of spatial analysis and nascent geospatial information science. The resulting new paradigm helped structure the emerging field of urban studies."

He spent time at two "hot beds" of geography: University of Chicago (1958-76) and the Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis at Harvard University (1976-81). Later he was dean of the Heinz School of Public Policy and Management at Carnegie-Mellon University (1981-86).

- UT Dallas News

The Street says:

The pros:

- forced TomTom to pay more
- relieved stockholders

The cons:

- still has to find a long term solution for mapping data; may have to build its own
- "But is it [it is] unclear how the Navteq contract gives Garmin the market leadership it sought in its bid for Tele Atlas." (Yair Reiner, an analyst with CIBC Capital Markets in a note to clients)
- where will Garmin get features it said it wanted in bidding on TA: "more realistic representation of surroundings, improved mobile search capabilities, including Internet-enabled local search, and extend itself into newer segments like in-dash, portable and mobile-phone navigation... real-time content such as traffic data."


Seeking Alpha says:

- very big win
- sealed long temr deal with NAVTEQ
- forced 45% premium payment by TomTom
- avoided debt
- stock up and good holiday ads

Hexagon, owner of Leica, will own Elcome Technologies as of Jan 1. Elcome distributes and integrates systems serving the fields of " field of positioning, navigation, alignment, measurements, and surveying using various technologies such as optical and GPS based equipment, aerial photogrammetry, GIS and mapping, construction and mining machine control, portable coordinate measuring machines, laser scanning, and weather meteorology." It has 80 employees in 12 offices in India.

- TradingMarkets.com