In-car navigation vendor, Telenav says that it has acquired skobbler, a European navigation company with the highest rated OpenStreetMap (OSM)-based GPS navigation apps in the world.
The acquisition has already been closed, and Telenav paid $19.2 million in cash and $4.6 million in shares.
"Crowd-sourced OSM can power personalized navigation services like Scout -- with highly detailed maps on a global scale," said HP Jin, Telenav's chairman and CEO. "We plan to offer Scout with OSM for much of the world. We have already made significant headway toward this goal in the U.S., including using OSM for our HTML5 version of Scout."
"Waze and Google -- or, just Google now -- provide similar mechanisms to improve their maps, based mostly on OSM's innovations. With one big catch. It is very much their map. Not yours," said Coast in his blog commentary today regarding the acquisition. "OpenStreetMap is different. All of the quality data contributed is openly available -- just like Wikipedia. So, anyone can download, experiment and play with it freely. It's not locked up beyond your reach."
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