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Microsoft buys Multimap for LBS reasonsby Tony Dennis Aiming to head off Nokia's growing position in the online mapping sector, the Beast of Redmond has acquired Brit mapping company, Multimap in a deal thought to be worth around £50 million ($ 102 million). Microsoft already offers a mapping service in the shape of Virtual Earth but Multimap will bring important local search capabilities to the equation. Interestingly Vole's manager of online services, Sharon Baylay, painted the acquisition as playing "a significant role in the future growth of our search business." What the Vole doesn't want to see is Nokia and, possibly, Google steal the lion's share of Location based services which everyone predicts will prove to be the key to mobile internet revenues. Nokia, of course, agreed to acquire Navteq back in October for around $8.1 billion in a move which snubbed Qualcomm over GPS as well as its search rivals. Perceiving the threat from handsets such as Nokia N95 which come with a GPS capability built-in, dedicated navigation device company, Tomtom has also been sniffing around digital map maker, Tele Atlas.www.multimap.com
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