Microsoft Corp. has acquired Multimap, one of the United Kingdom’s top 100 technology companies and one of the leading online mapping services in the world. The acquisition gives Microsoft a powerful new location and mapping technology to complement existing offerings such as Virtual Earth, Live Search, Windows Live services, MSN and the aQuantive advertising platform, with future integration potential for a range of other Microsoft products and platforms. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
“The addition of Multimap enhances Microsoft’s position as a leading provider of mapping and location platform services,” said Sharon Baylay, general manager of the Online Services Group at Microsoft. “This acquisition will play a significant role in the future growth of our search business and presents a huge opportunity to expand our platform business beyond the U.K. and globally. We are thrilled to welcome Multimap onboard.”
One of the best-known online mapping companies worldwide, Multimap provides a publicly available personal mapping service at http://www.multimap.com, as well as a range of integrated business services.
“Partnering with Microsoft gives us a world of new opportunities to build our mapping services into new technologies and applications,” said Jeff Kelisky, CEO of Multimap. “As one of the world’s foremost technology brands, Microsoft is in a position to bring even more value to the Multimap service and give people everywhere new, exciting and fun ways to get from point A to point B.”
Multimap will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft, as part of the Virtual Earth and Search teams in the Online Services Group. The acquisition is the latest in a series of moves as Microsoft seeks to expand its online services to deliver software, services, and premium content and applications to consumers and businesses.
December 13th, 2007
Today, Google announced its 2007 End-of-Year Zeitgeist. This year’s Zeitgeist reflects both the most popular and the fastest-rising global search terms that people have typed into Google.com. We mined millions of search queries to discover what captured people’s attention this year. To see the results of this research, both serious (news makers, presidential candidates, etc.) and light (movies, lyrics, ringtones, etc.), visit http://www.google.com/zeitgeist.
December 13th, 2007
Yahoo! today announced that it has become a platinum sponsor of The Apache Software Foundation (ASF). Continuing its dedication to open and collaborative computing and research, Yahoo!’s financial sponsorship of the non-profit, volunteer-run foundation will help provide much needed working capital, hardware infrastructure, and support resources required to serve the ASF’s industry-defining projects and incubating initiatives.
Yahoo!’s support of the ASF stemmed from its work with the Apache HTTP Server and Lucene projects. Today, several members of Yahoo!’s development teams are active, long-term code contributors to Apache Hadoop, the open source platform that makes it possible to efficiently process vast amounts of data on a cluster of commodity hardware.
Leading the industry in supporting free and open software for building the next-generation of Internet-scale web services, Yahoo! is contributing to an open source version of these powerful tools which are freely available to anyone who needs them. In addition, Yahoo! is committed to advancing the state-of-the-art in distributed computing through the incubation of new Apache projects.
Yahoo! has embraced, adopted, and contributed to community-driven initiatives and related open source technologies. This, in turn, enables engineers and researchers around the world to cost effectively tackle the most challenging problems in computing today, including search, analytics, machine learning, scientific modeling and more.
“Yahoo! is one of the few companies in the world that has the necessary resources, expertise and experience to build software of this quality and scale,” said David Filo, Yahoo! co-founder. “Sponsoring the ASF demonstrates our commitment to quality open source infrastructure. Both Yahoo! and the open source community have benefited from collaborating with the ASF, and we’re proud to be able to give back – by sharing our expertise and technology, as well as on a financial basis. We look forward to furthering our participation with the ASF in years to come.”
“Sponsorship is key to our financial viability, which, in turn, benefits the open source community at large,” said ASF President Justin Erenkrantz. “Yahoo!’s participation helps ensure that both our developer community and distributed computing projects continue to grow. We are thankful for Yahoo’s generous support and welcome them into our sponsorship program.”
Yahoo! joins current ASF sponsors Google, HP, Covalent, Tetsuya Kitahata and Two Sigma Investments.
December 13th, 2007
