Microsoft Acquires Multimap

Microsoft Corp. announced on Wednesday that it has acquired Multimap, a U.K. company that provides online mapping for Europe, North America, and Australia. This is the latest acquisition by Microsoft to boost its online services and advertising strategy.

Multimap, established in 1996, provides location based services to find local businesses, hotels, and restaurants, as well as business services to provide mapping, proximity searching, routing, aerial images with map overlay, and local information to business Web sites. Multimap also offers hotel and restaurant-booking services and builds private label mapping tools for companies like Hilton Hotels and Ford Motor Co..

Microsoft, however did not disclose the terms of the deal. The London based Multimap, will act as a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft. Microsoft said that all its employees will be integrated into the company's Virtual Earth and Search teams in its Online Services Group (OSG).

Sharon Baylay, general manager of the Online Services Group at Microsoft, said, “This acquisition will play a significant role in the future growth of our search business.” She added that the deal with Multimap presented "a huge opportunity to expand our platform business beyond the UK and globally".

In the recent past, Microsoft has been looking to boost the value and revenue, of OSG, which oversees MSN and Windows Live. The newly acquired online properties are seen by Microsoft to as a leverage to sell online advertising and generate revenue in this area to compete with arch rivals Google.

Microsoft had picked up a 1.6% stake in social networking site Facebook for $240m (£117m) and had procured US online advertising firm aQuantive for $6bn, earlier this year, to boost the revenue of its OSG.

Microsoft has also been collaborating with online content and service providers to offer online advertising. On Monday only, the company had announced an agreement with CNBC.com to be the exclusive provider of display and contextual advertising.

In the fiscal year 2007, that ended June 30, Microsoft’s revenue from online services grew only 8.7 percent from $2.3 million to $2.5 million. The company's first quarter 2008, has seen a 25 % increase in revenue over last year from the OSG sector. This has been attributed mainly due to the aQuantive deal.

Chris Liddell, chief financial officer of Microsoft has acknowledged that Microsoft would like to see more growth from this business segment when first quarter earnings are revealed.