From Microsoft PR:

"This morning at 7am PT, Microsoft announced the acquisition of Multimap, one of the United Kingdom’s top 100 technology companies and one of the leading online mapping services in the world. Multimap will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft as part of the Online Services Groups and the Microsoft Virtual Earth and Search teams. The acquisition will play a significant role in the future and growth of Microsoft’s Search business and the Live Search product and will strengthen Microsoft’s overall search, local and geo-mapping offering, driving further technological innovation through our business."
PR here.
The Guardian offers some facts and figures, though the price is not being disclosed.

Data from measurement firm Nielsen Online shows Google Maps has a 21.4% reach among the world's web users, compared with 1.4% for Multimap.

Google Maps recorded an estimated 71.5 million unique users during October and Google Earth, which offers satellite images as well as road maps, logged 22.7 million users.

Microsoft's Windows Live Maps had 7.1 million unique users globally during October.

Multimap had 1.4 million unique users, according to Nielsen, also behind rivals MapQuest, ViaMichelin, Mappy and Map24.

I'll note that while Multimap has great tech, it also has data. Recall from a recent post that Mulitmap has a "12 year old company created database."

"Det-Sgt Jeff Maher of the homicide squad confirmed that a Google Earth satellite mapping van had been filming the area for up to a week.

He said the images captured by satellite could hold some clues to the gruesome murder."

Brendan Roberts, reporting on the potential of Google data gathering to help in a murder investigation in Victoria.

- News.com.au

Mike Ippoliti reports on Navigation & Location 2007 held in early December at Telematics Journal. His provocative conclusion:

There will be map data competition for NAVTEQ and TeleAtlas, from new and potentially better sources, far sooner than most people expect.

If you haven't read enough about this summer's lawsuit which pitted MAPPS vs. the United States in a suit related to implementation of the Brooks Act, The American Surveyor offers Curt Sumner's personal take. Sumner is excutive director of the American Congress on Surveying and Mapping, a group that was not involved the amicus brief submitted by AAG and others. Recall that the judge didn't rule on the case instead declaring that MAPPS did not have standing to bring the suit.

Sumner points out something that's pretty important: that the sides didn't interpret the purpose of suit in the same way. That "difference of opinion" let to a lot confusion. Sumner writes:

So, it seems that the purpose of the lawsuit is being interpreted differently by the plaintiffs and their detractors. The plaintiffs contend that they are simply trying to have the FAR be required to comply with the intent of Congress by including among the definition of services to be procured using QBS those mapping services of a professional nature requiring specialized training and subject matter expertise. The detractors apparently believe that the lawsuit is intended to insure that only those who are professionally licensed by the respective states as engineers or surveyors have a monopoly over all federal mapping contracts.

PhysOrg.com shares the new research from Bugra Gedik, a researcher at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, and Ling Liu, an associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

While previous attempts at location privacy applications have been made, Gedik and Liu’s system is the first to enable individuals to choose the level of anonymity for different applications, while still providing nearly optimal performance. For example, a cell phone user could send a request for a local gas station offering the most inexpensive gas to a “location-based services” (LBS) provider, and receive an accurate answer even without the provider knowing exactly where the user is located.

...

The new system uses an anonymity-based approach called “location k-anonymity.” A user is considered to be location k-anonymous if their location information sent to the LBS provider is indistinguishable from the location information of at least k – 1 other users. In tests, the researchers experimented with k values from 2 to 12, with higher values meaning increased privacy, but also longer search times. In real life, different users could choose different k values for different applications based on their personalized privacy requirements, but the researchers predicted that even the most privacy-conscious users would be satisfied with a k value of 5.