I was enjoying dinner last night with some other geospatial folks at a reception preceding tomorrow's New York State Geospatial Summit. The topic turned to Where 2.0 and the really great ideas there and how alas, perhaps 1 in 20 had a shot of "making it."

It made reading the tale of the death of Meetro, one of early location-based social network tools rather sad. But, it's a valuable read for anyone with startup fever.

Tele Atlas CEO Alain De Taeye spoke at the Reuters Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit in Paris on Wednesday noting that once the TomTom Tele Atlas deal closes the company will jump into new offerings, including some powered by data gathered by users.

The idea is to tap into data collected by TomTom users and push it into Tele Atlas mapping products and TomTom services. How soon? Six months suggested De Taeye. In particular:

TomTom has gathered extensive data on maps and driving conditions -- its users submit about 10,000 corrections to maps every day, and a large number of drivers have also allowed the company to gather anonymous statistical data from their devices.
...
[It] would also make new products possible in areas such as real estate and urban planning.

TomTom has amassed 1 trillion data points, the equivalent of driving every road in Europe and the United States a thousand times.

This data can make routing more accurate and also opens new opportunities for Tele Atlas' geographical information services business. A buyer may for instance use it to learn what traffic around a property is like throughout the week.

Not a big surprise here; the trick will be integrating the two companies' technologies.

- Reuters