Last week Norwegian aerial imagery provider Blom announced it had renewed and extended their existing agreement with Microsoft until 2014. The agreement allows Microsoft the right to use Blom’s database of oblique aerial images - RealImages. This database is based on Pictometry technology and covers more than 1,100 cities in...

Garmin today reported its financial results for the fourth quarter and the fiscal year 2009. The fourth quarter revenue was $1.059 billion, up 1% from $1.048 billion in fourth quarter 2008 and the total year revenue was $2.95 billion, down 16% from $3.49 billion in 2008. For the fourth quarter 2009 the Automotive/Mobile...

TomTom today announced its financial results for the fourth quarter and fiscal year 2009. During the fourth quarter 2009 the revenue of the Dutch company was €533 million, up one percent against the previous year. The operating result was €113 million (against €70 million in Q4 2008) and the operating margin 21 percent....

According to a recent SEC filing, location-based services provider Apisphere raised $4.6 million in funding. Apisphere, founded in 2006, has developed LBS plug-in to Salesforce CRM and Microsoft Outlook; more recently the company launched location-aware mobile marketing tools. Last year the company also bought Navit...

Harman Becker Automotive Systems GmbH has decided to discontinue all its activities in the field of portable navigation devices, leaving its PND brand to Falk Navigation GmbH that is renamed to United Navigation GmbH. The new company - effective since January 11, 2010 - will operate under the two brands: Becker and...

Travel geotagging app developer GlobalMotion Media, Inc. has closed a $1 million series A round of funding. The company operates EveryTrail, an online community for GPS trip sharing (200,000 user-generated trips), and licenses its technology platform to corporate customers, such as REI (outdoor retail), Toyota, BF Goodrich, and...

Boston-headquartered location-based gaming platform SCVNGR raised $4 million from Google Ventures just before Christmas. The company was joined by existing investor Highland Capital on this second round of funding. Rich Miner (founder of Android and partner at Google Ventures) and Peter Bell (founder of Storage Networks...

This week wireless services provider TeleCommunication Systems (TCS) completed the acquisition of Networks In Motion (NIM) for $170 million. TCS’s management gave an overview of this acquisition during a call with financial analysts. It appears from the call that NIM currently has 3.5 million subscribers to its...

Last week, Kevin Rauckman, Chief Financial Officer at Garmin spoke at the Barclays Capital Global Technology Conference and indicated that Garmin’s fourth quarter through Black Friday was in line with expectations in terms of margins, the number of units sold and the average selling price per unit. Kevin Rauckman...

Last month speed camera warning specialist Coyote System was sentenced by a French court to pay €75,000 to its competitor GPS Prevent for copyright infringement. The French court found that Coyote System had copied a speed camera database created by GPS Prevent and resold it to a third party. The third party was not held...

TomTom today announced it has acquired ilocal, a business listings company based in Amersfoort, the Netherlands. ilocal which employs 70 people owns a database of categorized and geo-referenced business listings in the Netherlands (www.ilocal.nl) and Belgium (www.ilocal.be). The company is said to have “technologies in...

Announced this week, the acquisition of Networks In Motion (NIM) by Telecommunication Systems (TCS) for $170 million, is marking another chapter for the LBS industry in the United States. This acquisition took place just one month after TeleNav - NIM’s biggest competitor - announced its initial filing for an IPO and that Google...