Garmin enters the smartphone market and announced Nuviphone (I especially like the NuviPhone detail):
Unlike the iPhone it comes with comprehensive GPS functionality like navigation and built-in geotagging, which is great and makes it a potential phone-upgrade-candidate! More information here, here and here. via [BlinkGeo]
TomTom did the obvious step and raised their offer up to 30 EUR per TeleAtlas share, making TeleAtlas worth a decent 2.9 billion EUR.
Why do I get the feeling that, no matter who wins the poker game, the loser will run into big “devices without data” troubles?
The point I’m more concerned about is how will the outcome of this poker game affect other TeleAtlas clients. It’s quite obvious that the future TeleAtlas owner will try to get the investment back. And what would be easier than to have a look at existing costumers? Since TeleAtlas and NAVTEQ (now part of the Nokia empire) were in monopoly excellent data vendor positions, many clients depend on their services.
Just like a considerable part of public administration (transport planning, etc.) relies on TeleAtlas (or NAVTEQ) data. So I guess, thanks to privatization and outsourcing, the TeleAtlas bill is partially going to be paid with tax money too. [via heise]
Naturfreunde published over 900 Austrian hiking, bike, ski, etc. routes as GPS data on their recently launched Tourenportal. In addition to the GPS tracks they provide some more information such as best season to go, an elevation profile, route length, descriptions, etc. about the routes. A KML file lets you nicely preview each tour in Google Earth. The project is a cooperation with Garmin, who is hosting the GPS routes as service too.
The GPS device is no problem, but if I only had the right shoes to do a hike I’d give that service a try. Maybe somebody should come up with a more urban tourportal…
[via kartentisch]