It's time to look back on the year with Directions Media's editors Joe Francica, Adena Schutzberg and Nora Parker. The industry watchers pick out a few themes and explore what they mean today and look a bit into the crystal ball. Among the topics: the value ($$$) of geo, the new geodata, "neogeography," convergence, the quick-deciding user and the GPS-enabled ski jacket. The podcast is 27 minutes long and was recorded on Dec 17, 2007.

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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."

Nokia's stock price fell on an expected tightening of margins in the hardware business, as the company announced little growth in revenues for the next two years. Shares were down 4.5% this morning in Europe.

In the meantime TomTom put out shares for sale to help finance its acquisition of Tele Atlas. TomTom's shareholders approved the acquisition on Tuesday. The offer: "8,156,250 new ordinary shares at a price of 56 euros ($82.26) per share, raising gross proceeds of approximately 457 million euros."

- Reuters (Nokia)
- Reuters (TomTom)

This week we couldn't agree on a single topic so we bring you two. First Adena Schutzberg explores ESRI's decision to hire a senior executive who will promote agile product management within the company. Then Joe Francica highlights parallels between what's going on in mergers and acquisitions in the broader IT market and in geospatial. The podcast is 13 minutes long and was recorded on November 30, 2007.

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The CEO in question is AND's Chief Executive Officer Maarten Oldenhof. AND, based in The Netherlands competes with Tele Atlas (TomTom is in process to buy it) and NAVTEQ (Nokia's in process to buy it).

AND started pondering its sale in the last few months. On Oct. 10 it hired ThinkEquity Partners LLC for advice on among other things selling now or waiting with the hopes of a better price. AND's market value has doubled to 54.1 million euros since word of the the Nokia/NAVTEQ deal. Unlike Tele Atlas and NAVTEQ which use field surveys AND uses land registry as the basis for its mainly European maps.

In the first half of 2007 AND reported a profit of 710,000 euros and net sales of 2.43 million euros Tele Atlas's sales totalled 136.8 million euros and NAVTEQ revenue $362.3 million. Another tidbit from the CEO: The company would need one year and about 15 million euros to build a detailed North American map.

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Bloomberg