In the race to bring about the marriage of advertising and cartography, Microsoft is looking to make do on a remarkably tight budget. The $50 million (£24.5 million) that it is thought to have spent on acquiring Multimap is dwarfed by the sums paid by others on mapping services.

TomTom, the largest manufacturer of car sat-nav systems, was forced recently to raise its original €1.8 billion (£1.3 billion) bid for Tele Atlas, the digital maps supplier, by a cool €1 billion after Garmin, an American rival, weighed in with an offer. Nokia stepped up to the plate and bought Navteq for $8.1 billion.

The buying frenzy has been stoked by the conviction that consumers will soon discount anything but highly personalised information. In short, data has to be tailored to their location. Google, for instance, recently announced an “assisted GPS” application able to glean a mobile phone’s position. If you don’t know where you are, a near-omniscient Google will.

The basic cartographic details supplied by groups such as Tele Atlas are key, but Microsoft – as well as buying Multimap’s users – looks to be betting that the smartest part of the process to be involved in is making that raw data useful to consumers.

Multimap gathers data from 37 sources – including Tele Atlas – to make it human-friendly. It does this, in part, by adding details of business locations to digital maps. If you are looking for a certain retailer in, say, Hackney, you can send a request to Multimap’s Storefinder4Mobile service via your mobile and it will send directions.

Microsoft’s aim, of course, is to have businesses pay fees to have their address appear at the head of a list of search results. It has ample resources to augment the quality of the data that Multimap provides. At the moment, for example, it is taking aerial photos, at no small cost, of the world. Those will be overlaid on to Multimap’s system.

The risk it runs is that players such as Tele Atlas choose to keep their valuable basic information to themselves. Google, it should be noted, has just hammered out a partnership with TomTom – Tele Atlas’s new owner.

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