Many in the press saw and heard a presentation from Tele Atlas this week about how the company updates its data - now including TomTom satnav users' input via MapShare. Those updates now enters Tele Atlas Map Insight program and eventually can end up in the latest datasets. I only saw the slides as there were technical difficulties. But I don't think we were privy to this story Brady Forest tells at O'Reilly Radar that was shared by Patrick McDevitt's talk at the Web 2.0 Expo Europe.

Map Insight is a work in progress and hasn't always anticipated customer behavior. People like to play with their GPSs update features. Last December, right after Christmas, the Map Insight servers started receiving a large amount of block/unblock updates. It turns out people were blocking their street to confirm the feature worked and then correcting the data afterwards -- not realizing the confusion it was causing at the Tele Atlas headquarters.

Clearly, there's still lots to learn about crowdsourcing and human behavior. I suspect this holiday season the folks at Tele Atlas will be prepared for such antics. Alternatively, they might try to dissuade users from these activities, though I can't think of a simple way to do that.

TomTom reported operating profit just over analysts expectations for the third quarter, but the company cut expected profits for the year. Investors were worried about how the company would repay loans taken out to acquire Tele Atlas and TomTom allayed fears by renegotiating those deals. Share prices were basically flat on the news.

- Reuters

- results on Marketwatch (oddly NOT on TomTom's or TA's website)

John Puopolo, most recently the vice president of software and product engineering at Tele Atlas, has signed on as CTO at Massachusetts-based Searchandise Commerce, an eCommerce ad network for product manufacturers. While at TA, the press release notes, "he transitioned his engineering organization to a global structure, streamlined the engineering practices and adopted contemporary development techniques resulting in a substantial decrease in time-to-market for end-products and 100 percent improvement in software quality in just 18 months. Through consistent, on-time delivery to both domestic and international customers such as Google, Microsoft and MapQuest, he helped grow company revenue a combined 58 percent in 2006 and 2007."