The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) and the Tampa Bay Estuary Program’s Manatee Awareness Coalition (MAC) want to save manatees. But for years, no mapping company's would put the manatee and homeland security zones in Tampa Bay on the navigation maps. But now Garmin is. The information is on all new chart plotters and updated SD cards.

Kipp Frohlich, leader of the FWC’s Imperiled Species Management Section, said “This marks a breakthrough that can save a lot of manatees. We tried unsuccessfully for years to get any mapping company to put the zones in their map covers. Garmin stepped up to the plate and did it.”

This is a great story and I do appreciate that Garmin stepped up, but if we all really want to save manatees, shouldn't this data be freely available to install on any unit? Perhaps that's naive and it's not how the boating navigation GPSs/charting tools work, but I thought I'd ask.

- TCPalm

There's been inklings of this idea in the past and it sounds valuable. Instead of using a map to tease out your exact location, take a picture of a landmark, have a database with many such photos find a match, and viola, you are found! Nokia is working on this sort of technology and it's already been tested by students at Stanford and U. Washington.

The latest dataset to appear on satnav? High car crime areas. Basically, it's a warning about where NOT to park your car. The feature is currently available from Sanyo one of its Gorilla branded devices. Alas, so far data is only available for Osaka. Interestingly, there almost no car crime in Japan, but elsewhere...

- Tech Radar

My Mom (now retired) was a librarian. She taught me early on that if I thought there should be a book about some topic, there probably was. She was right, of course. These days I tell people if they think there should be a website or mashup about some topic there probably is, though it might harder to find than books in the library. Now we are getting to the point where we can almost say "if you think there should be a spatial data set on a topic, there probably is."

This was driven home to me today when I read this press release about a free website and for-fee downloads for sat navs of points of interest for celiacs (folks intolerant to gluten). You can download for $5 or $10 per state locations of bakeries, groceries, restaurants and the like that cater to celiacs.

As I don't have a satnav I've not researched this, but is there a clearinghouse for such offerings? That is, does someone offer an index to all the POI layers downloadable for satnavs, perhaps by brand? The one noted about is "CSV formatted as points-of-interest (POI) for your Garmin or Navman."

TomTom said its first quarter revenue will be around 260-270 million euros far below last year's 296 million euros.

With formal reporting expected April 23, operating margins will be single digits vs. recent double digit quarters. European trading saw shares tumble 13.8 percent to 22.78 euros ($35.78) in Amsterdam.

The impact on the TA acquisition?

TomTom's share price has halved since November, and after Tuesday its market capitalization is slightly less than the price it is paying for Tele Atlas.

One analyst suggests it may make it difficult to finance all the debt that comes with the deal. However,

TomTom's Chief Financial Officer Marina Wyatt said she was "comfortable" that TomTom will be able to meet creditor's demands in financing the Tele Atlas buy.

- AP

A mostly "old news" article from CBS News talks about GPS thefts and advice to prevent them. (Don't leave them in plain site; wipe off "fingerprints" of suction cups.) But, ends the article with this:

GPS manufacturers like Garmin and TomTom are trying to make their products less tempting to steal. New models now require you to enter a 4-digit pin number to work, the hope being if thieves know they can't use it, maybe they won't steal it.

Think that'll work?