After the announcement of TeleAtlas on the availability of maps of India, the competition scene is clear and complete. 2009 is going to be an exciting year where the coverage, content battle will be fought by TeleAtlas (TomTom), Navteq (Nokia) and the local Indian players like SatNav and MapmyIndia. Interesting to also to know Google’s strategy on what they want to do with India data which they painstakingly built over the years, which by the way, is of excellent quality. To my mind, it appears that Google will come out with some innovative business model to commercialize this data very soon.
One thing is apparent is that there is a consolidation happening on the way the maps are made. TomTom is betting on its community feedback technology Map share where the central theme is millions of updates. Nokia labs are also testing their mobile platforms for community feedbacks. Google anyway is the original thinker of this entire process of community feedback which they call it as crowd sourcing. Google’s latest platform Mapmaker launched last month is dedicated to this effort.
Following this community feedback route are local Indian companies. SatNav for instance is pioneering an interesting offer to its clients with its “pay-per-POI” scheme called citizen map per. I think it’s a smart move towards enriching their datasets
This new way of map making and updating of maps will surely help location based products and services market to evolve and help generate the much required pull from the customers..
One thing is apparent is that there is a consolidation happening on the way the maps are made. TomTom is betting on its community feedback technology Map share where the central theme is millions of updates. Nokia labs are also testing their mobile platforms for community feedbacks. Google anyway is the original thinker of this entire process of community feedback which they call it as crowd sourcing. Google’s latest platform Mapmaker launched last month is dedicated to this effort.
Following this community feedback route are local Indian companies. SatNav for instance is pioneering an interesting offer to its clients with its “pay-per-POI” scheme called citizen map per. I think it’s a smart move towards enriching their datasets
This new way of map making and updating of maps will surely help location based products and services market to evolve and help generate the much required pull from the customers..
