The commission staff had said that it wanted TomTom to address worries that the pricing for maps might become prohibitive after the takeover. The commission's solution was to create a new map supplier by compelling TomTom to sell rights to its database.
The Dutch company instead promised in December in a letter that the relationship between Tele Atlas and its customers ``will remain exactly the same.''
And why wouldn't Tomtom promise this? In my opinion the whole point of the merger was to create a new revenue stream for Tomtom by selling mapping data to its competitors (and other customers such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft). I am sure that another major goal behind the merger is to cut costs and improve the process of collecting mapping data by taking advantage of all of its car navigation systems (like the Dash does).
The next major deal waiting to go through in the geo space is Nokia's acquisition of mapping data provider NAVTEQ (which Nokia is doing for similar reasons). Will the EU make the same demands of Nokia?
Nokia, NAVTEQ, and Tele Atlas will all be speaking at Where 2.0 next week at the SFO Marriott. NEWCOL /*Here is editing area.Translators can post your translation texts blow.*/ 去年夏天GPS厂商[[http://tomtom.com/|Tomtom]]成功击败对手[[http://garmin.com/|Garmin]]得到了地图数据提供商[[http://teleatlas.com/|Tele Atlas]]（有人也会说是Garmin成功抬高了收购Tele Atlas的价格）([[http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/11/tele-atlas-still-in-play-garmi.html|Radar post]])。现在据[[http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601085&sid=aT3HGyB51HLE&refer=europe|Bloomberg]]消息该交易已被欧盟批准，但也不是一帆风顺。 >委员会曾经希望Tomtom解决大家对收购之后地图价格会很高的担心。委员会的想法是再建立一个新的地图供应商，强制Tomtom把数据库的版权卖给该供应商。\\ >荷兰公司则是在12月份的一封信里承诺Tele Atlas和所有客户的关系“都是绝对相同的。” 为什么是这样？我认为两个公司的合并关键是要建立一个新的收入流，就是Tomtom向竞争对手（以及其他客户像Google、Yahoo和微软）销售地图数据。另一个主要目的是降低成本并且通过采用所有汽车导航系统的优势来提高采集地图数据的过程（就像[[http://dash.net/|Dash]]一样）。 下一个地理空间方面等待批准的交易是[[http://nokia.com/|Nokia]]收购[[http://navteq.com/|NAVTEQ]]（Nokia的目的相同）。欧盟也会向Nokia提出同样的要求吗？ Nokia、NAVTEQ和Tele Atlas都会在下周SFO Marriott的[[http://conferences.oreillynet.com/where|Web 2.0]]上讲话。