Leave for a day and Nokia shells out 8+ billion for Navteq

oh man, I go away for one day and look what happens... the Rockies finish up an amazing regular season with a crazy win (luckily the game was still on while driving back from the airport!) and then yesterday I'm sitting in on a meeting with some Forum Nokia execs and they ask me if I heard that Nokia bought Navteq... I almost dropped! I heard the big news while getting the low-down on what Nokia will be doing with Flash and more specifically Flash Lite now at release 3. Nokia is committed to cranking out new devices that will support Flash 3 and something new to me, Adobe's CS3 product lineup offers developers are very impressive application development environment that enables creation, testing and deploying applications to mobile devices that support Flash. This really is quite huge, particularly when you now toss in the fact that Nokia owns Navteq and all their assets... wow. Can you imagine the applications that will be developed to run in the Nokia Maps ecosystem. I'm guessing that as Nokia Maps migrates to the OVI space (Nokia is moving their games and maps platforms to what is known as OVI) and the 3+ million members of Forum Nokia ( the world's largest mobile developer community) start thinking more about compelling mapping-based applications, we'll be seeing some pretty amazing stuff! This is just the tip of the iceberg and getting pretty exciting although I guess I'm not totally surprised at what's gone down. A tip.. want an audience for your mobile apps, demos, trial ware and even docs? Check out MOSH mosh.nokia.com! FYI, Navteq has some 3000 employees around the Globe. Some reports seem to think that this deal may have been a bit too sweet ($78 US per share) although Navteq shares have soared recently due to speculation that Garmin may have been chasing them - of note, Nokia' shares dipped slightly once the acquisition (Nokia's largest ever) was reported. Some food for thought... Forum Nokia developers (the World's largest developer community at 3million strong,, now has access to Navteq data to use in their apps... hmmmm.