Thursday, October 30. 2008

New GPS Owners Confuse Tele Atlas

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.