Garmin GPS - I want a GPS unit that uses Tele Atlas not Nav Tech data!

Author

I want a GPS unit that uses Tele Atlas not Nav Tech data!

4phun

2006-09-30, 4:33 am

Below is a Wired News article that alerted me to Tele Atlas. If I could
get this it could solve the problem I have with Garmin's crap Nav Tech
data being incorrect or out of date. I want accuracy and upto date
navigation maps and routes not map data that is two to five years old
or plain just never corrected at all.

I drive for a living.

Any suggestions on making the switch? Help!

Map Quest
It's geeky data miners vs. old-school drivers in the pitched battle to
provide digital driving directions to the likes of Google and Garmin.
May the best map win.
By Wilson Rothman

SLOUCHED IN AN undecorated cubicle in Lebanon, New Hampshire, sleeves
rolled up on his button-down shirt, David Williams is looking for
one-way streets. It's frustrating work. Williams stares at his email
inbox: a solid wall of news alerts from Yahoo and Google. His search
terms aren't the usual fare, like "Hilary Duff." They're more like
"Tulsa city one-way" - queries that will help Williams track down
announcements of road changes reported by local newspapers. Today has
been slow, but suddenly he lights up. An email has arrived containing a
newspaper report that a particular one-way road segment in northwest
Indiana is changing from westbound to eastbound. Sweet!

The soft-spoken 34-year-old is employed by the world's second-largest
street-mapping company, Tele Atlas, and each discovery Williams makes
- 30 to 40 per week - soon ends up on a map of the country. That
information will then become accessible to computers, GPS devices, and,
one hopes, the car navigation system used by the UPS delivery guy in
Indiana. The project may make Williams sound Dilbert-esque, but he's
actually part of a shift in the way that road maps get made. Maps have
long been created by people driving around and marking their trails, as
if working a giant Etch A Sketch. Navteq, the biggest road-map maker,
still does it that way. But Tele Atlas, which until recently competed
with Chicago-based Navteq the way that Burger King competes with
McDonald's - making much the same things in much the same way - has
decided to plot the world by starting with the electronic news alert
instead of the steering wheel. The cartographic competition has
suddenly become intense.

At least 60 million people regularly consult online maps, and last year
1.2 million cars were sold with built-in navigation systems, a number
that has quadrupled over the past three years. Cell phone manufacturers
are starting to install GPS, too. That's a lot of customers up for
grabs for the two companies, one proudly declaring its aspiration to
put wheels on every road in America, the other boasting that its
employees almost never leave the office.

"DON'T DRIVE IF YOU can possibly help it," says Don Cooke, a founder of
modern digital mapping. The gray-bearded New Englander started out
making maps for the US Census Bureau in the late '60s and eventually
formed a private company called GDT, which helped the bureau build the
first complete database of the nation's roads. In the late '90s, Cooke
realized that the market for giving out electronic driving directions
to car renters was potentially quite lucrative. He wanted in.

Adamant about compiling data, instead of looking for it out the window,
Cooke started with road classification information from the Census
Bureau and determined rough speed limits so he'd have a sense of which
routes were most efficient. Next, GDT acquired detailed aerial
photography of major cities. "We could look at a street and see which
way cars were parked, even tire rubber going into intersections, and
deduce 85 percent of the turn restrictions and one-way attributes,"
Cooke says. Some state transportation departments offered video footage
of their streets to GDT, and Cooke's employees would fast-forward
through hours of tape, noting every road sign. Impressed by how much
faster and cheaper maps could be updated with this approach, Tele
Atlas, a Belgium-based company, bought GDT for $100 million in 2004.

The merger vastly improved the tools that the former GDT geeks had been
using. Williams and his colleagues can now tag roads with hundreds of
attributes, like whether there are prohibitions against U-turns and
which direction one-way streets run. Tele Atlas researchers also scour
US Postal Service records of new addresses and databases of road
construction contracts, as well as satellite images, aerial
photographs, and drawings of highway interchanges.

Tele Atlas had revenue of $250 million last year, half that of Navteq,
which provides almost all the data for Mapquest and Google Maps. But
Tele Atlas also grew by 57 percent in 2005, more than twice Navteq's
rate, and is picking up some of its rival's customers - Pioneer, for
example, has switched from Navteq to use Tele Atlas in all of its
navigation systems. Industry experts expect the surge to continue.
"It's not that Navteq has done anything wrong," says Philip Magney,
principal analyst at Telematics Research Group. Tele Atlas, he says,
has just been more innovative and aggressive.

FOR ALL THEIR DIFFERENCES, the two companies are now turning to the
same tool: customer participation. Caltrans, for example, sends new
road data to Tele Atlas. Another Tele Atlas customer, Qualcomm, has its
fleet vehicles transmit GPS readings from homes and businesses not
listed on the company's maps. Recently, Tele Atlas launched a beta
program called MapInsight, which allows anyone to report map errors or
changes. The company also does barter deals with locals - giving
reduced rates to merchants who will edit its maps. "We've had projects
with pizza-delivery companies where we've printed out for them a big
wall map of their 30-minute delivery area. The guys mark things that
are wrong and send it back to us," says former GDT president Mike
Gerling, who now heads Tele Atlas' North American division.

Navteq, too, is enlisting individual users and plans to sort through
the masses of comments and feedback it gets by giving priority status
to the geekiest, most frequent customers - the people CTO Salahuddin
Khan calls "fans of the process." With armies of users on each side,
Khan says, the competition becomes all about freshness. "At some point,
all maps are capturing the same information," he says. "So the question
becomes, Who has the latest updates?"

Back at Tele Atlas, Williams is fretting about that one-way street in
Indiana. He needs to confirm the switch. Not long before, he spotted an
article in the Wisconsin State Journal's sports section that noted in
passing a street in Green Bay had been renamed Reggie White Way, after
the Packer defensive end. The story didn't mention the street's
previous name, but Williams knew that Green Bay's city Web site keeps a
public catalog of its council minutes, where he uncovered the original
name: Progress Street. Now Williams wants the same success in Indiana
- and he'll be proud when he gets it. After all, he is the man who
put Reggie White Way on the map.
Wilson Rothman (wilson_rothman@hotm
ail.com) is a New Jersey-based tech
writer.

jeffcarp

2006-09-30, 10:33 am

To think TeleAtlas is the glory child and Navteq is junk is just plan
nonsense. They both have their strengths and witnesses.

You can "solve the problem with have with Garmin's crap Nav Tech (sic)
data" by simply spending 60 seconds of your time to submit errors to
them. Over the last 5 years, they have fixed every one of my nearly 45
submissions that I've made. In the time it took you to complain on
this group, you can have submitted 2 or 3 changes to Navteq.

4phun wrote:
> Below is a Wired News article that alerted me to Tele Atlas. If I could
> get this it could solve the problem I have with Garmin's crap Nav Tech
> data being incorrect or out of date. I want accuracy and upto date
> navigation maps and routes not map data that is two to five years old
> or plain just never corrected at all.
>
> I drive for a living.
>
> Any suggestions on making the switch? Help!
>
>
>
> Map Quest
> It's geeky data miners vs. old-school drivers in the pitched battle to
> provide digital driving directions to the likes of Google and Garmin.
> May the best map win.
> By Wilson Rothman
>
> SLOUCHED IN AN undecorated cubicle in Lebanon, New Hampshire, sleeves
> rolled up on his button-down shirt, David Williams is looking for
> one-way streets. It's frustrating work. Williams stares at his email
> inbox: a solid wall of news alerts from Yahoo and Google. His search
> terms aren't the usual fare, like "Hilary Duff." They're more like
> "Tulsa city one-way" - queries that will help Williams track down
> announcements of road changes reported by local newspapers. Today has
> been slow, but suddenly he lights up. An email has arrived containing a
> newspaper report that a particular one-way road segment in northwest
> Indiana is changing from westbound to eastbound. Sweet!
>
> The soft-spoken 34-year-old is employed by the world's second-largest
> street-mapping company, Tele Atlas, and each discovery Williams makes
> - 30 to 40 per week - soon ends up on a map of the country. That
> information will then become accessible to computers, GPS devices, and,
> one hopes, the car navigation system used by the UPS delivery guy in
> Indiana. The project may make Williams sound Dilbert-esque, but he's
> actually part of a shift in the way that road maps get made. Maps have
> long been created by people driving around and marking their trails, as
> if working a giant Etch A Sketch. Navteq, the biggest road-map maker,
> still does it that way. But Tele Atlas, which until recently competed
> with Chicago-based Navteq the way that Burger King competes with
> McDonald's - making much the same things in much the same way - has
> decided to plot the world by starting with the electronic news alert
> instead of the steering wheel. The cartographic competition has
> suddenly become intense.
>
> At least 60 million people regularly consult online maps, and last year
> 1.2 million cars were sold with built-in navigation systems, a number
> that has quadrupled over the past three years. Cell phone manufacturers
> are starting to install GPS, too. That's a lot of customers up for
> grabs for the two companies, one proudly declaring its aspiration to
> put wheels on every road in America, the other boasting that its
> employees almost never leave the office.
>
> "DON'T DRIVE IF YOU can possibly help it," says Don Cooke, a founder of
> modern digital mapping. The gray-bearded New Englander started out
> making maps for the US Census Bureau in the late '60s and eventually
> formed a private company called GDT, which helped the bureau build the
> first complete database of the nation's roads. In the late '90s, Cooke
> realized that the market for giving out electronic driving directions
> to car renters was potentially quite lucrative. He wanted in.
>
> Adamant about compiling data, instead of looking for it out the window,
> Cooke started with road classification information from the Census
> Bureau and determined rough speed limits so he'd have a sense of which
> routes were most efficient. Next, GDT acquired detailed aerial
> photography of major cities. "We could look at a street and see which
> way cars were parked, even tire rubber going into intersections, and
> deduce 85 percent of the turn restrictions and one-way attributes,"
> Cooke says. Some state transportation departments offered video footage
> of their streets to GDT, and Cooke's employees would fast-forward
> through hours of tape, noting every road sign. Impressed by how much
> faster and cheaper maps could be updated with this approach, Tele
> Atlas, a Belgium-based company, bought GDT for $100 million in 2004.
>
> The merger vastly improved the tools that the former GDT geeks had been
> using. Williams and his colleagues can now tag roads with hundreds of
> attributes, like whether there are prohibitions against U-turns and
> which direction one-way streets run. Tele Atlas researchers also scour
> US Postal Service records of new addresses and databases of road
> construction contracts, as well as satellite images, aerial
> photographs, and drawings of highway interchanges.
>
> Tele Atlas had revenue of $250 million last year, half that of Navteq,
> which provides almost all the data for Mapquest and Google Maps. But
> Tele Atlas also grew by 57 percent in 2005, more than twice Navteq's
> rate, and is picking up some of its rival's customers - Pioneer, for
> example, has switched from Navteq to use Tele Atlas in all of its
> navigation systems. Industry experts expect the surge to continue.
> "It's not that Navteq has done anything wrong," says Philip Magney,
> principal analyst at Telematics Research Group. Tele Atlas, he says,
> has just been more innovative and aggressive.
>
> FOR ALL THEIR DIFFERENCES, the two companies are now turning to the
> same tool: customer participation. Caltrans, for example, sends new
> road data to Tele Atlas. Another Tele Atlas customer, Qualcomm, has its
> fleet vehicles transmit GPS readings from homes and businesses not
> listed on the company's maps. Recently, Tele Atlas launched a beta
> program called MapInsight, which allows anyone to report map errors or
> changes. The company also does barter deals with locals - giving
> reduced rates to merchants who will edit its maps. "We've had projects
> with pizza-delivery companies where we've printed out for them a big
> wall map of their 30-minute delivery area. The guys mark things that
> are wrong and send it back to us," says former GDT president Mike
> Gerling, who now heads Tele Atlas' North American division.
>
> Navteq, too, is enlisting individual users and plans to sort through
> the masses of comments and feedback it gets by giving priority status
> to the geekiest, most frequent customers - the people CTO Salahuddin
> Khan calls "fans of the process." With armies of users on each side,
> Khan says, the competition becomes all about freshness. "At some point,
> all maps are capturing the same information," he says. "So the question
> becomes, Who has the latest updates?"
>
> Back at Tele Atlas, Williams is fretting about that one-way street in
> Indiana. He needs to confirm the switch. Not long before, he spotted an
> article in the Wisconsin State Journal's sports section that noted in
> passing a street in Green Bay had been renamed Reggie White Way, after
> the Packer defensive end. The story didn't mention the street's
> previous name, but Williams knew that Green Bay's city Web site keeps a
> public catalog of its council minutes, where he uncovered the original
> name: Progress Street. Now Williams wants the same success in Indiana
> - and he'll be proud when he gets it. After all, he is the man who
> put Reggie White Way on the map.
> Wilson Rothman (wilson_rothman@hotm
ail.com) is a New Jersey-based tech
> writer.

helena

2006-09-30, 12:33 pm

> 4phun wrote:[color=darkred
]

I don't know much about Navteq, but I did recently hear about Tele
Atlas' Map Insight program which, as mentioned, lets consumers go to
the web site and provide feedback on incorrect roads, routes, etc. I
think it's a really great move and a big step ahead - sort of helps to
put Tele Atlas "on the map" if you will (please excuse the pun!)...

There is more info on the Tele Atlas web site under Map Insight if you
want to check it out.

peter

2006-10-06, 10:33 pm

helena wrote:
>
> I don't know much about Navteq, but I did recently hear about Tele
> Atlas' Map Insight program which, as mentioned, lets consumers go to
> the web site and provide feedback on incorrect roads, routes, etc. I
> think it's a really great move and a big step ahead - sort of helps to
> put Tele Atlas "on the map" if you will (please excuse the pun!)...

I've been submitting such corrections to NavTeq's website for years
already and they've been quite responsive about incorporating them.
Typically I get an almost immediate automated response email
ackowledging the correction and then, about 1 - 2 months later, I get a
detailed response indicating that they've verified the problem, how
they've updated their database, and letting me know when it'll appear
in their next release.

I wouldn't be too quick to jump to TeleAtlas although it's good that
they're continuing to provide NavTeq with good competition. Neither is
perfect and it's always possible to find particular places where one is
better than the other.

robncourt2005@gmail.com

2006-10-07, 4:33 am

Do you really want to see how good TeleAtlas maps are in the U.S.? Try
navigating with a TomTom, which uses TeleAtlas and see how impressed
you'd be with the thousands of locations that it cannot find -
addresses and streets that have been around forever and which NavTeq
easily locate.

TeleAtlas is strong in Europe, and currently crap in the US. That
might change one day, but not a the present moment.

helena

2006-10-13, 10:33 pm

robncourt2005@gmail.com wrote:
> Do you really want to see how good TeleAtlas maps are in the U.S.? Try
> navigating with a TomTom, which uses TeleAtlas and see how impressed
> you'd be with the thousands of locations that it cannot find -
> addresses and streets that have been around forever and which NavTeq
> easily locate.
>
> TeleAtlas is strong in Europe, and currently crap in the US. That
> might change one day, but not a the present moment.

I have heard the opposite thing - people who have used TomTom units,
which do feature Tele Atlas maps, and have been nothing but completely
thrilled. In any case, it's important to note that all mapping
companies will have their errors - it's impossible to account for every
road change all of the time. But Tele Atlas is changing and trying to
account for consumer input, which I think is great. I have heard good
things about TomTom and their maps abroad as well as in the U.S.

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