u-blox acquires Geotate for €5.5m

Sharon

Sharon Gill

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4th April 2009

u-blox will integrate the Geotate business into its existing activities.

The transaction price comprised €2 million for a royalty-free patent licence arrangement with NXP for selected patents, and €3.5 million for the outstanding Geotate shares.

The acquisition gives u-blox gain access to a broad GPS patent portfolio, and enables the company to expand its GPS offering with GPS geotagging products.

These products are based on Geotate's software GPS technology "Capture and Process", which enables portable devices to automatically add a geotag to an image in a fraction of a second without compromising the user experience or the devices' power consumption.

According to IMS Research, the GPS camera market will grow to more than 40 million units in 2012, across both professional and consumer orientated cameras. Popular photosharing websites such as Flickr, Picasaweb and Apple's latest version of iPhoto already offer users new ways to further organise and share their images based on location-tags.