Slashgeo

The Map Room and All Points Blog links to a Wired article on TeleAtlas and NAVTEQ data collection strategies. From the article: "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." On this previous story, we learned Tele Atlas wants to benefit from customer feedback to improve maps.

ixcer writes "A joint press release announces that TomTom, the world’s largest navigation solution provider, will acquire Tele Atlas, the biggest data provider for navigation systems, including Google, Yahoo!, AOL and Nokia. The announcement starts this way... "TomTom N.V. (“TomTom”) and Tele Atlas N.V. (“Tele Atlas” or the “Company”), jointly announce that the expectation is justified that an agreement can be reached in connection with a public offer by TomTom for all outstanding shares of Tele Atlas at an offer price of € 21.25 in cash, (the “Offer Price”) per ordinary share (the “Offer”).

The Supervisory Board and the Management Board of Tele Atlas (the “Boards”), after having duly considered the strategic, financial and social aspects of the proposed transaction, support the intended Offer and conclude that the Offer is in the best interests of the shareholders and all other stakeholders of Tele Atlas. The Boards of Tele Atlas will, when the Offer is made by TomTom, recommend acceptance of the Offer by the shareholders of Tele Atlas."" Update: 07/23 17:41 GMT by S : All Points Blogs provides more links such as the Reuters article.

The DataLibre blog informs us that Toronto will soon have street view data acquired by Tele Atlas. From the blog: "This CBC.ca video gives a brief on how 2d and 3d street view data are collected. In this case it is the city of Toronto and the data collector is Tele Atlas. [...] At 500 km a day and terrabytes of data, these folks are collecting and selling tons of geo-information that we like to play with on google earth, help find places in mapquest, and allow city planners or police forces to prepare evacuation plans, understand the characteristics of the route planned for a protest or know the point address in a 911 call."

This morning I received an invitation to the TeleAtlas Maps in Apps 2007 contest, so I thought that I would share it with all of you. The contest is described as "targeted at consumer and business applications that are not LBS focused, but include mapping or location as a functionality enhancement." Winners of this contest will be showcased on public websites and at the Tele Atlas booth at CTIA 2007. They will also receive cash as prizes and free Tele Atlas map data. Registration is open till September 23rd so register now and get hacking! TeleAtlas is using this contest to announce their new Tele Atlas® DeveloperLink(SM) program. The program is described as:

A "free online resource for developers of Internet, mobile, and other next-generation digital map applications. The service provides sample data, sample applications, technical tools, and business resources to help developers reduce time to market and increase their potential for success. Members gain access to Tele Atlas' peerless database of geographic content, and to the world's largest community of geographic application developers."

It will be interesting to watch this and see what exciting new applications come from here.

The Map Room links to a GPS Review article about a comparison of NAVTEQ and TeleAtlas, the two main rivals in road databases. The article's conclusion: "So would I now recommend Tele Atlas maps over NAVTEQ in the USA? Not necessarily. I’m keeping my prior position that the map vendor isn’t currently something that should be a big consideration when looking to purchase a GPS device in the USA. If these results are representative of the entire database the difference between them would only amount to finding less than a dozen more addresses in a year, navigating to a new address every day."