The global telecom giant Vodafone has closed Wayfinder. Wayfinder is the location software based Swedish. Vodafone acquired it around a year ago for sum of $ 33 million (SEK 239 million). Vodafone saw huge potential in the service that is about social location, at the time of acquiring Wayfinder.

But today, within just a year's time things have changed drastically. This is because of players like Nokia and Google are now offering these services to the users for free. Thus the option for telecom companies to charge the users for these services is falling. However, still the importance of these services cannot be declined.

Keeping in mind the way things are going on, it is for sure that the telecos will not have an option to charge consumers for such services in long term. Verizon Wireless has launched its Motorola Droid smartphone which comes along with Google's navigation suit for absolutely no additional cost. The telecom company charges $3 per day or $10 a month for the GPS services.

Keeping in mind the recent developments, the telecom major Vodafone will stop working on developing the new suite of location services for which the company actually acquired Wayfinder. The company is instead looking at joining hands with new partners so that it can offer location services for free, in order to stay competitive.