I attended the Web 2.0 Mapping Meetup last night. It is really a great venue for the hottest Web 2.0 Mapping companies to present their latest and greatest. For proof of this, Geogad presented its latest benefit to travelers, its ability to mix and match content so that travelers can build their own custom tours.

But last night’s companies were a little weak for my tastes. One of the companies has given virtually the same presentation at Location 2.0 a week or so before. Another company was Yahoo presenting FireEagle. The problem is that I had seen the FireEagle presentation at the beginning of the summer. The only new piece to their presentation was a partnership that they had with a mobile hardware vendor. This vendor sold a wireless communication device that you could use to precisely give you position to fire and rescue if you were hiking in a remote area and needed help. Nice but of limited value to city people. I had really expected to see more progress from FireEagle after all these months. The problem is mentioned as a feature by the speaker. Yahoo created FireEagle for third party developers to create value for this product. Companies see no reason to pay their own people to develop this value themselves.

The only company that had anything new was Abaqus. With their service you can post your geotrack logs to the web. You can also include text, photos and videos. The only problem was that there was no clear revenue stream. It is an interesting service, but I cannot imagine that I would ever personally have a need for this much info on my movements. It may be more compelling for companies that need to keep track of employees. But I still can’t see why such a company would want to post this information to the web.

If you are in mobile communications, the place to be this week is CTIA Wireless in San Francisco. The concentration of wireless knowledge is just about as great as the concentration of free booze and food.

The major event for Geogad was SiRF’s Location 2.0 summit. This full day event consisted of moderated panels from industry experts and pitches from local startups. The part that I liked most was the frank talk about the new GPS system that Europe is creating to compete with the US GPS satellite system. According to the experts, the 3 billion euro project will actually end up costing 10 billion and will be competed around 2016, not the current estimate of 2013. Ouch! It has been a great way for the US system to become more competitive and to improve faster. It does make you wonder if the European system might be out of date by the time it is put in place.

I was not able to attend the keynotes at CTIA, but this gave me a wonderful way to ask people what they thought were the best points from the keynotes. The thing that seemed to make waves was Yahoo’s Blueprint system. It seems to be a free way for developers to quickly and easily make mobile web sites and mobile widgets and web apps. I cannot speak to the usefulness or the quality of Blueprint, but it may make things more difficult for the service providers that are currently creating the mobile sites for small and medium sized businesses.

The biggest news in Silicon Valley is the un-news of the Microsoft-Yahoo merger. After three and a half months, Microsoft has finally walked away from the deal in disgust.

No wonder. Yahoo tried everything and talked to everyone they could find to avoid dealing with Microsoft. When that failed, they tried to play hard-to-get with a $37/share price tag. If everyone knows that no one wants to buy Yahoo, it takes a lot of moxie to say that $31 or $33/share is not enough. This strategy depends on the buyer not knowing that they are the only bidder, which obviously was not the situation here.

Jerry Yang, CEO of Yahoo, and the Yahoo board are taking the blame, as they should. When you sit in the big office, you get the lion’s share of the credit and the blame. Maybe Jerry really did not want to sell at any price. According to the New York Times, Jerry and the board exchanged high-fives when they heard that Microsoft was walking away. Yahoo is the most successful company that Jerry is likely to be associated with. I am sure that the programmer/engineer in him did not want to give up his favorite toy or his status as top dog and resident genius.

Poor Jerry. Now he has to prove that his company is really a $37/share company. It does not seem like he has any new ideas about how to make Yahoo more profitable.

Poor Jerry. He should have spent some time in Istanbul negotiating for a carpet or even at a user car dealership trying to buy a car. He would have quickly learned some basics of negotiating. Such as when you have a deal on the table, you work hard to close the deal or you stop wasting everyone’s time.

If Microsoft decides that buying Yahoo makes sense (and there are plenty of reasons why the combo does not make sense), then walking away now is the best plan. They can always come back in a few quarters when Yahoo will still be struggling and the shareholders will have given up hope. Then they can offer $20/share and get essentially the same company and assets. That’s the way to negotiate.