november 2007 archives

Sunday, November 11, 2007

Buy or be bought on the digital mapping market

This week, Navteq acquired Mapsolute, the German company supplying the technology behind the Map24 online mapping website, just weeks after Navteq itself was acquired by Nokia! Of course, the offer of $40 million for Mapsolute seems only petty cash compared to the $8.1 billion for Navteq or even the $3.3 billion (Garmin) and $4.2 billion (TomTom) offers for TeleAtlas. Furthermore, the combination of a map publisher and an mapping website is not particularly new. The interesting point is, that this vertical integration came about through acquisition rather than setting up new subsidiaries. Not only MapQuest started as the Cartographic Services division and produced printed road maps, but also the mapping website ViaMichelin is part of the Michelin Group with its renowned know-how in the publication of maps and guides. In the light of Nokia being one of the world's largest manufacturers of mobile telephones, Mapsolute's Map24 Mobile may be an interesting addition to Smart2go, or Nokia Maps.

These recent dynamics in the digital mapping industry seem to herald a new round of further consolidation:

Geospatial value stackCompanyAcquired by
Mapping portalMapQuestAOL
Mapping engineMapsoluteNavteq
WhereOnEarthYahoo
VicinityMicrosoft
KeyholeGoogle
TrafficTraffic.comNavteq
Satellite imageryVexcelMicrosoft
Aerial imageryPanoramioGoogle
Road network dataNavteqNokia

Simeon Simeonov provides his opinion on things to come for the digital mapping industry on his blog:

The Multimap API that has support for OSM and GeoNames and AND donating some of their mapping data to OSM seem to be developments that certainly emphasise Simeon's view.  permanent link for this entry