Thursday, May 15. 2008

Dangermond on TomTom Acquisition Approval

"The world needs utility companies that create and manage geospatial data," he said. "And these are companies that have fought their way to the top and they're very good: they serve their data and sell their data to our users in the private domain."

That's part of an somewhat confusing article from C|net. The approval of the deal part is ok, but when the author mentions Google Maps being a company and the new deal between ESRI and Google, things get a bit mixed up.

One company that has teamed up with ESRI is Google Maps, which now use digital maps from both Navteq and Tele Atlas. John Hanke, head of Google Maps and Google Earth, said that there is a vast amount of geodata locked up in different government agencies that should be made publicly available.

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so, um, what's it mean?

#1 Peter on 2008-05-15 22:55 (Reply)

I believe the real question is what will these aquisitions cost consumers. Both the Tom Tom and Nokia deals are not cheap; 4.5 & 8.1 billion dollars respectively. Someone will have to pay the price for access to this data. And now there will be two companies contolling most of the digital mapping data used in GPS devices and web based mapping applications(Google Earth, etc.).

#2 Tim Heinse on 2008-05-16 12:01 (Reply)

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