Garmin announced that they’ve dropped out of the bidding for TeleAtlas after cutting a long-term deal with Navteq. This makes good business sense to me. It will be interesting to see how TomTom leverages their purchase as the digital map data providers are now set to duke it out via devices.

An interesting and related story from Business Week claims that, “The Paperless Map is the Killer App.” With 162 million navigation-ready cell phones this year, it appears that location-based services have finally hit their stride.

I’m still hoping that some carrier will unlock access to the GPS signal without having to buy an expensive service. Perhaps Google will be that savior?

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