The Multimap acquisition will complement Microsoft’s other mapping services, including Virtual Earth and Windows Live services. It will also boost Microsoft’s potential to be a key online mapping provider, as it looks to better compete with both Google and Yahoo.

Data from Nielsen Online shows Google Maps has a 21 percent reach among the globes users, compared to 1 percent for Multimap. Google maps had an estimated 71. 5 million unique visitors in October and Google Earth had 22.7 million unique visitors.

Microsoft’s Windows Live Maps had 7.1 million unique visitors globally during October. Multimap had 1.4 million users in October, trailing competitors MapQuest, ViaMichelin, Mappy and Map24.

"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 UK and globally," said Sharon Baylay, the general manager of Microsoft’s online services group.

Microsoft said their was future potential to intergrate Multimap on it products and platforms.

"Partnering with Microsoft gives us a world of new opportunities to build our mapping services into new technologies and applications," said Jeff Kelisky, the chief executive of Multimap.

Mulitmap will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft, as part of the Virtual Earth and Search teams in the Online Services Group. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.

WeRoam’s customers can find their nearest Wi-Fi hotspots, for almost any address in Europe and North America, and access interactive maps showing their exact locations, together with the hotspots available in a given neighbourhood.

The service is available on www.weroam.com by simply clicking on the Hotspot Directory Service link on the home page. The user can click down to the desired hotspot using the interactive geographic map finder or use Multimap’s real-time geocoding engine. To use the latter, the user selects the country of interest, enters a street address and city, and/or postal code.

The Hotspot Directory Service then delivers a list of the nearest Wi-Fi hotspots fitting the user’s specifications, with full contact details and a link to a Multimap interactive, street-level map which represents their respective locations as icons. Full contact details plus information about supported authentication modes appear beneath the map delivered. This one is a nice score!

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Anything Geospatial: Tracking developments affecting GIS, geospatial technologies, location-based services, mapping, google earth and google maps. Published by the creator and editor of GISuser.com & LBSzone.com