TOMTOM PREPARES THE GPS OF THE FUTURE
Based in Amsterdam, the company that invented portable GPS devices for the general public has over the years become an essential partner in the automotive industry. Its expertise relates to mapping and traffic information, available both in dashboards and on smartphones.
In the automotive sector, maps for navigation systems are supplied by two key players: HERE and TomTom. And both are Europeans. The first, American origin (formerly Navtech) belonged for a time to Nokia before being bought by Audi, BMW and Daimler to prevent it from falling into the hands of a GAFA. The second sketched in 2007 a historical actor of Dutch origin, Tele Atlas, which he delighted with the beard of the American Garmin. In fact, the arrival of TomTom in this universe is really a coincidence. Originally, the company - then called Palmtop - produced software for pocket PCs, including Psions (which people under 20 cannot know).It changed its name in 1998 and soon after released software (Navigator) which at the time worked with SD cards on what is called a PDA, a mini-computer that the smartphone ended up dethroning. And the story really begins in 2004 with the release of the TomTom GO, the first portable GPS for the general public. While on-board navigation systems are still rare and expensive, it becomes possible to find your way by using a touch screen (which does not exist in the automobile at the time) and in color. Over the years, the company will multiply the novelties, with the voices of celebrities (Star Wars, the Chirac des Guignols), the updating of maps via the Internet and especially LIVE services (traffic, fuel prices, weather forecast, places parking).And the story really begins in 2004 with the release of the TomTom GO, the first portable GPS for the general public. While on-board navigation systems are still rare and expensive, it is becoming possible to find your way by using a touch screen (which does not exist in the automobile at the time) and in color. Over the years, the company will multiply the novelties, with the voices of celebrities (Star Wars, the Chirac des Guignols), the updating of maps via the Internet and especially LIVE services (traffic, fuel prices, weather forecast, places parking).And the story really begins in 2004 with the release of the TomTom GO, the first portable GPS for the general public. While on-board navigation systems are still rare and expensive, it becomes possible to find your way by using a touch screen (which does not exist in the automobile at the time) and in color. Over the years, the company will multiply the novelties, with the voices of celebrities (Star Wars, the Chirac des Guignols), the updating of maps via the Internet and especially LIVE services (traffic, fuel prices, weather forecast, places parking).it becomes possible to find its way by using more a touch screen (non-existent then in the automobile) and in color. Over the years, the company will multiply the novelties, with the voices of celebrities (Star Wars, the Chirac des Guignols), the updating of maps via the Internet and especially LIVE services (traffic, fuel prices, weather forecast, places parking).it becomes possible to find its way by using more a touch screen (non-existent then in the automobile) and in color. Over the years, the company will multiply the novelties, with the voices of celebrities (Star Wars, the Chirac des Guignols), the updating of maps via the Internet and especially LIVE services (traffic, fuel prices, weather forecast, places parking).
This positioning will lead TomTom to enter the automobile industry. The challenger from consumer electronics will indeed land his first contract with Renault (first on board the Carminat navigation system, in 2008, then later on the R-Link tablet). A revolution that will be repeated at PSA, as well as at other major brands including Fiat (where the GPS has been coupled to the Eco Drive to help consume less). Connected GPS (with integrated SIM card then becomes standard). Outpaced by HERE, which historically has strong positions in original equipment among manufacturers, TomTom has nevertheless contributed to democratizing navigation. And it continues to offer products for the general public (cars, motorcycles, camper vans) and professionals * (utilities, trucks),even if the effort is now more focused on guidance software and applications. At the same time, this Dutch player continued to innovate to refine its road maps. It was he who, for example, was the first to have the idea of ??equipping vehicles with HD cameras to capture as much information as possible to enrich his road base. They travel 3 million km per year and collect billions of points (700,000 per second, or 4 billion pixels per km). Moreover, it is no longer human operators, but computers equipped with artificial intelligence that process these immense amounts of data (whose scale is the petacobyte).It was he who, for example, was the first to have the idea of ??equipping vehicles with HD cameras to capture as much information as possible to enrich his road base. They travel 3 million km per year and collect billions of points (700,000 per second, or 4 billion pixels per km). Moreover, it is no longer human operators, but computers equipped with artificial intelligence that process these immense amounts of data (whose scale is the petacobyte).It was he who, for example, was the first to have the idea of ??equipping vehicles with HD cameras to capture as much information as possible to enrich his road base. They travel 3 million km per year and collect billions of points (700,000 per second, or 4 billion pixels per km). Moreover, it is no longer human operators, but computers equipped with artificial intelligence that process these immense amounts of data (whose scale is the petacobyte).but computers with artificial intelligence that process these immense amounts of data (the scale of which is the petabyte).but computers with artificial intelligence that process these immense amounts of data (the scale of which is the petabyte).
Another strong point of TomTom is the traffic information, which is accurate to 10 m on the start and end of traffic jams. Here again, he was able to anticipate user expectations, first with IQ Routes (which is based on driving habits and speeds practiced to refine the calculation of the route and travel times depending on the day and of the hour) and HD Traffic (an information service based on the speed of mobile phones moving on the road network to enrich traditional sources and provide a more realistic estimate of congestion). Today, all the services are grouped under the name TomTom Traffic. Thanks to partnerships **,the publisher receives data (anonymized on position and speed) from more than 600 million drivers in 70 countries. A base that allows it to hold out against behemoths like Google (whose traffic information is provided by its subsidiary Waze). And it is for this reason that it is legitimate to publish for almost 10 years a barometer on the traffic in more than 400 cities in the world (TomTom Traffic index). It should be noted in passing that one of its main competitors, the American Inrix, publishes a similar index with… different results! In the media, we continue to quote Bison Futé's figures, but they are far below the reality that this service allows to apprehend in real time. Widely used by manufacturers (generalists or Premium),and present for example on sites such as Mappy or Viamichelin, or in the maps of smartphone giants such as Apple and Huawei, it has been used to measure the impact of confinement on travel during this Covid period.