Intel Corp. on Friday said it had signed an agreement to acquire Telmap, a provider of navigation and location-based services, search and content. Telmap This move is a step towards expanding the chip giant's mobile software services capabilities as Intel continues to grow in the area of software and services.

Telmap provides unique, end-to-end mobile location-based services that include the Mobile Location Companion, which is the world’s first personalized mobile location companion, serving as the meeting place for all things local, social and personal, a complementary web companion, and a location platform and APIs to support customers in delivering a strong LBS strategy.

Telmap is all about empowering mobile industry players to offer worldwide mobile location-based services that enrich consumers’ on-the-go experiences anywhere in the world, whether in their cars or on-foot, using a wide range of mobile devices. As such, the Telmap Mobile location Companion is open to premium content from any third party content provider, adding value to each consumer in their respective geographies. Telmap is the selected location solution provider of leading industry players Orange FT Group, Vodafone, Vodacom, SFR, Telefonica-O2, MTS, SingTel, OPTUS and more.

Telmap will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Intel and will thus continue to serve its existing customers.

From a consumer perspective, Telmap should help Intel to bring to life its vision for integrated, uniform experiences across consumer devices. Telmap has a lot of expertise around end-to-end mobile local search, mapping and navigation services.

"Telmap delivers great multi-platform consumer experiences every day, and we’re looking forward to combining that focus and excellence with Intel’s to significantly grow their business . But Telmap isn’t just a great consumer service provider – with Telmap we can directly provide developers with location-based services spanning devices, operating systems and CPU architectures. This is a significant step towards the Intel AppUp services vision we spoke about yesterday," said Piter Biddle, an official for Intel.

Eventially, Telmap will allow Intel to provide AppUp developers with great, differentiated location capabilities in the form of a standard set of location-based APIs and software that developers can easily integrate into their AppUp apps.

These new cross-platform location capabilities will allow developers to not just retain their users, but delight them via in-app and in-experience location features that they just can’t really do today, Intel said.

Tags: Intel, Telmap, Atom, AppUp