According to several news reports, Dutch sat nav company Tom Tom is offering around $2.5bn to buy struggling map maker Tele Atlas, the company that supplies Tom Tom's digital base maps for its popular GPS devices.

Tele Atlas is the number two digital map provider after its chief rival Navteq. Both companies have over the years created massive street-level databases using teams of field researchers pounding the highways and byways of the US and Europe. This has helped them avoid the tricky and expensive problems of licensing government map data. Tom Tom's new Mapshare service that lets users update and correct errors they find will be a handy tool to reduce some of Tele Atlas' shoe leather costs.