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

It'll be announced this morning at Where, but there's a blog post about first set of apps. Only a few are particularly spatial - WeatherBug weater, Caldwell Banker home search and speed traps from Trapster. As TechCrunch notes, it's odd that to get info on the API you must send e-mail rather than say read all the details then apply for a code or something. I guess Dash hasn't been watching how the rest of the tech community is doing APIs.

Wow, it's getting deep as everyone wants to brand location-based services. This article (in GovTech) on a AAA/Motorola app drove it home to me.

The Motorola MOTORAZR 2 V9m phone equipped with AAA Mobile, gives users turn-by-turn audio navigation and visual route maps. Powered by Networks in Motion, the AAA Mobile application is available on several GPS-enabled cell phones and smartphones via Verizon Wireless, Sprint and Alltel.

So, Motorola wants its name on a cool phone with a cool app. AAA wants its name on the app. NIM wants to be the technology provider. Oh, and NIM white labels deCarta's services. This is going way beyond the days of Intel inside!

Rumors are floating that Garmin may be entertaining a deal with Nokia for a nav device. The stock folks wonder if this is a sort of back up plan should the Nokia/NAVTEQ deal fail. Chin strokers suggest that if that and the TomTom/Tele Atlas deal fail, Garmin would be in a safe place.

- Seeking Alpha

This past week two of the many tech players with a toe in the geospatial waters, Apple and Yahoo, announced new developer offerings that will add to the twists and turns location based services have taken on the road to maturity. One of the services of the iPhone SDK is Core Location, meaning developers can develop native applications that take advantage of the pseudo-location abilities. We'll have a look at the iPhone SDK and Fire Eagle from a geospatial perspective plus explore what the real reason is for wanting navigation on your mobile device.

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