Thursday the EU said it would extend its review of the proposed acquisition by 10 working days. The decision was made by the commission and both companies, said a spokesperson. Tele Atlas lost as much as 3.7 percent on the news. The extension may mean the acquisition may not complete until the second half of the year. One other change: TomTom now has a bit more time to offer remedies to the concerns.

- Bloomberg

I just caught wind of this acquisition which occurred in January but was announced March 14. EarthMap owns the IP from Resource21 and serves the ag market with remote sensing technology. Several ex-DigitalGlobe employees launched EarthMap as a spinoff in 2004. Monsanto's been a customer of the 7 person shop and now owns the people and tech. Recall that another ag-focussed geo-biz, GeoVantage, went to John Deere in recent years.

- Boulder County Business

CNN Money reports that both pending acquisitions of Tele Atlas and NAVTEQ have "lost their bearings." NAVTEQ's stock is trading almost $10 below the $78 per share offer from Nokia.

Yesterday was the deadline for TomTom to respond to EU questions about the acquisition. What did the EU ask?

Whether:

(1) TomTom and Tele Atlas would keep sensitive information from rival GPS customers confidential,
(2) Tele Atlas would provide TomTom competitors inferior maps,
(3) the combination created efficiencies otherwise unattainable.

The article goes on to note that what happens with TomTom/TA will likely impact Nokia/NAVTEQ and that the drop in stock prices suggests Wall Street is wary.

"The concern, the [Dow Jones] story says, is shrinking competition in the market for GPS devices. The Commission is already conducting an in-depth probe of TomTom’s pending bid for Tele Atlas." The source of the original report is "“three people familiar with the deal.”

-
Barrons

"We're still a licensing fee based company. ...More and more we're looking at advertising to make revenue."

- Clifford Fox, Navteq's senior VP map division, as told to ZDNet.com.au (did anyone else notice that ZD filed for bankruptcy (G4) this week? Yikes!)

- C|net

The U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) commission the report titled, "Independent Study of the Roles of Commercial Remote Sensing in the future National System for Geospatial-Intelligence" early last year. It explores four possible business cases for how the government and private companies might work together to provide needed imagery for those agencies and their government clients. The suggested path is not the status quo and may have implications for the two current U.S. commercial satellite providers DigtialGlobe and GeoEye. Our editors try to tease out what the report means and its implications.

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