“We’ve seen a great deal of speculation in the past week about Apple buying a company to help it solve its nagging mapping headache. The big rumor, both started and squashed by TechCrunch, was Waze, the crowdsourced mapping and traffic app,” John Koetsier reports for VentureBeat. “The only problem with that theory? Waze would only slow Apple down.”

“At least, according to Skobbler’s Marcus Thielking. He’s the cofounder of Skobbler, a spinoff from Navigon that sells one of the top mapping solutions in the world: GPS Navigation 2 (US$0.99 for iPhone and iPad). It’s got a No. 1 sales ranking in app stores in 20 countries and has sold more than three million copies. It’s also based on OpenStreetMap, the crowdsourced ‘Wikipedia of maps,’” Koetsier reports. “‘There are only two companies that could possibly make sense for Apple to buy,’ Thielking said this morning from Europe. ‘There’s Garmin, which doesn’t use TomTom, on which Apple Maps is built, and there’s TomTom itself. TomTom would be my bet.’”

Read more in the full article here.