Friday, June 8. 2007

TomTom MapShare allows drivers to edit maps

TomTom announced a new feature called MapShare on Wednesday. It allows drivers to capture changes in the road attributes that aren't reflected in the map data. The first look at what it is can be seen in the GPSPassion Forums including some screen shots of the UI. The press release has a lot of marketing-speak but the screen shots give a clue what they're doing. Drivers can edit map attributes and POI's but not road geometry. So it's not exactly OpenStreetMaps but it's a very interesting start. More interesting would be what TomTom will do with the data and the extent to which they will share the changes with the map data suppliers. I suspect they won't but that leaves the issue of who will validate the changes. That's a massive effort that TeleAtlas and NAVTEQ do very well. It will be interesting to see how that plays out.
It's another step in bringing customers what they've been saying they want for a long time: up-to-date maps. Kudos to TomTom for this innovation.

Posted by Marc Prioleau at 17:58 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0) |

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Is there any chance that you could contact Teleatlas and get the real scoop on this? It seems to me that if TomTom owners only report errors via Map Share and don't report them to Teleatlas via their MapInsight then Teleatlas will miss out on a huge amount of customer feedback. What if any will be Teleatlas' role in this?

#1 Chris Cooper (Link) on 2007-06-10 11:23 (Reply)

Won't anyone joke with drivers and change wrong road?

#2 Bee (Link) on 2007-06-10 12:48 (Reply)

Wonder why TomTom started MapShare. Is it really to improve / create maps or is it a way to reduce helpdesk calls?

I suspect they got fed up with the slow map updates of TeleAtlas and/or Navteq and the cost they have to make to deal with complaints on the mapping sight.

#3 john on 2007-06-11 07:01 (Reply)

Bee, this tidbit from Gizmodo explains how you can avoid getting bogus data.

Even if you don't sync, you will automatically see changes you made yourself, but if you do sync, you can also get, in order of trustworthiness: changes verified by TomTom, changes to assorted POIs you subscribe to, changes from sources trusted by TomTom, changes reported by "many" and changes reported by "some."

#4 Chris Cooper on 2007-06-11 18:01 (Reply)

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