http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/21/tomtoms-map-share-update-brings-crowdsourced-navigation-to-ipho/
Sounds to me like the exact same thing waze is doing. TomTom has a big advantage here: userbase and good basemaps!
Indeed. What will Waze do to strike back?
Only problem is some people don’t want to fork out $100 for a tomtom app in every country. I still prefer Waze over tomtom although Waze has its downsides.
I doesn’t sound like the exact same thing as waze to me at all. The crowdsourcing of maping data is a double edged sword. Crowdsourcing map edits may be more nimble. But if I’m paying for priviledge of using the TomTom map, they better have some quality control in there that I don’t see in waze.
But more important, I don’t use waze for the crowdsourced mapping data. I use waze for the crowdsourced realtime road condition data (the realtime traffic data). For me, TomTom won’t come close to waze’s potential until it crowdsources traffic data.
It does already. Called IQ Routes. Been there for a while now. Not very well communicated and I never heard of it until today, but it exists already.
I have only infrequently had an opportunity to use a TomTom device, but my understanding is not that they crowdsource the traffic info the way that Dash did. They do seem to use good historic traffic data to inform you of unusual traffic (as opposed to the Google traffic display which shows the same bad traffic in the same location every workday). They also seem to pay for decent realtime info, which as far as I can see comes from various govermental and fleet sources. Do they really gather realtime traffic data from their users?
Even with all that, when I have had the chance to use a TomTom device or use their version of the Live Map on their website, the routing does not do any better than I do without a GPS to avoid traffic here in Washington, DC. The worst problem they seem to have is to only track traffic on the major roads. So when traffic is bad, they just seem to route onto the minor roads that they are not tracking in realtime. They are exanding their inventory of roads for which they track realtime traffic, but that just seems to push their rush hour routes onto more minor streets for me.
Waze does not yet give me better results, but the potential seems to be there. I am hoping that waze learns fairly quickly whether routing through residential streets during rush hour is really faster.
For the historical data, they collect data from their millions of TomToms in the field, who collect extensive logs and exchange them when connected to a PC. This is their IQ system.
The HD system collects data for live trafficinfo, and for that they use anonymized trafficdata from cellproviders (vodaphone in particular in the netherlands), combining it with non-anonymous trafficdata from some of the bigger players in logistics and data from their latest generation of devices. So, every wazer using gprs or 3g from Vodafone.nl is gathering movementdata for TomTom as well. Actually, the anonymous data is not GPS-data, but triangulation from celltowers. It is only exact enough to cover 20% of the roadnetwork. As you noticed - only the major roads.
It shows that you can have quite messy inputdata, as long as you have LOADS of it.