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Cyborgs, part human and part machine: that seems like a reasonable way to understand the new group of mobile phone driving navigation apps that use your travel to build a collective real time map of roads, driving hazards and more. They are right in the middle of an important continuum - sensor devices capturing data, with more or less human involvement, for the purpose of aggregate analysis and the creation of new services.

On Wednesday crowdsourced mobile mapping startup Waze announced it has raised $25 million more in venture capital. Now this afternoon mobile speed trap and road hazard mapping app Trapster is reported to have turned its 9 million cyborg mapping army into a bidding war among big potential acquirers, in the end won by NAVTEQ for an undisclosed sum.

Android 2.0 just got its first killer app: Google Maps Navigation. Google Maps Navigation for Android 2.0 will be available for free and will be part of the default Google Maps app on Android 2.0 phones. The service offers all the features that users expect from a modern GPS app, including traffic data, 3D view and turn-by-turn voice guidance. Because it's connected to the Google cloud, the app can also display street view images, satellite imagery and real-time traffic data. Google also implemented a voice recognition feature.

After a flurry of activity around Google Maps over the last few weeks, it now looks like Google is also ditching Tele Atlas as its data provider for Google Maps in the US in favor of a do-it-yourself approach. Google had been using data from Tele Atlas' maps since September 2008 after moving away from Navteq's data after Navteq was acquired by Nokia. Now, Google will use its own data, which it will supplement with data from government sources and a crowdsourcing approach.

Can you imagine a news-delivering web application so compelling that you would pay a couple of dollars per month for it? What would it look like? That's the challenge facing The Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri. They're working on a project called "Information Valet," which hopes to save the failing newspaper industry by finding a way to move news journalism online while making it profitable and sustainable.