Thursday, February 26. 2009

TomTom/Tele Atlas Pursues LBS Platform Offering

GPS Business News has the story. Here's the key quote from CEO Harold Goddijn, speaking today at the Fourth quarter conference call.

So what you will see coming out of Tele Atlas-TomTom is a set of tools and platforms to make it easy and fast to deploy location-based services in a variety of applications and contexts. That platform of development, you can see some of that if you go to our website and see our route planner. That is a branded expression of those platform tools, but you can expect further development in that space. We will make that type of development available in a white label to a wide variety of customers in the mobile space for them to develop specific applications.

So, instead of standalone solutions noted last year, the company will compete against the likes of deCarta, the recently spun off Autodesk Location Services among others. The big distinguisher? The TomTom offering will be tied to Tele Atlas data. As GPS Business notes, the company is very late to that space.