So TomTom is acquiring Tele Atlas and according to the joined press release, one of the main benefits is “more accurate navigation information” by utilizing “[…] TomTom’s installed user base of over 10 million GPS devices to effectively operate as map surveyors in an automatic and simple way.”
So let’s look at this in more detail.
The above seems to refer to the June 2007 announcement of TomTom to introduce a feature they call Map Share (see the press release). While the overall concept was greeted with a lot of applause, the first release of Map Share boils down to offer only very limited feedback possibilities and they will not be as automatic and simple as promised.
The features are:
- Block and unblock a street
- Reverse a street’s traffic direction
- Edit a street name
- Add a missing POI
- Edit a POI
- Report other errors
The Map Share feature will at first be offered with the newest yet to be released TomTom GO 520 and TomTom GO 720 - so it is essentially not installed on any of the over 10 million devices today.
TomTom enthusiasts have expressed their disappointment on online message boards about Map Share’s limited feedback possibilities and also about how participation is encouraged: Not at all.
One user wrote: “When I help to improve the map data, I’m expecting some kind of reward or a discount when buying a map update. Who am I to report map improvements via TomTom to Tele Atlas and then pay them for my own improvements?”
Another user suggests to simply find a way to post the corrections and improvements to a server for everyone in the TomTom community to download for free, bypassing Tele Atlas. Something that even TomTom has thought about already, planning to offer the exchange of non-validated map changes via their TomTom HOME service which over 1 million users have signed up for.
Without doubt there will always be altruistic enthusiast aka Social Utilitarians who are willing to submit correction for a better future. Tele Atlas has introduced Map Insight in late 2006, a process of reporting map improvements on the Tele Atlas website. Joy Morel, Tele Atlas Consumer Markets Director said they receive “thousands of reports each month for review” in an interview with ClubTomTom. He goes on to explain that “these reports go through extensive quality control checks to ensure only the most accurate reports are captured and expedited into Tele Atlas systems.” This sounds fair but I wonder how Tele Atlas is going to cope with a growing number of user reports, especially when contributors expect to see their submissions in the next map update release they purchase.
But let’s refocus on the promise of a large community of TomTom owners continuously improving Tele Atlas’ map data. The challenge is still ahead: How to get a large volume of user to contribute?
As we all know the obvious top incentive is filthy lucre. This can work in three ways.
Offer a relatively small incentive for every report, just like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk has built a business model around farming out simple desktop tasks for about 10 cents a task.
Or do it the other way around. Just remember the guy requesting a discount in exchange for submitting a report.
And then you can always advertise a really big incentive that will only be granted to one randomly winning contributor - lottery style.
TomTom’s management may want to take a look at how Luis von Ahn is trying to harvest the idle moments in our lives and turn them to productive use. WIRED has a great article with the punch line being: “People will contribute their brainpower, but only if they’re given an enjoyable, time-killing experience in exchange.” Yes, we are basically talking about something quite similar to a video game. Whether this is the road to follow I’m not too sure, but it definitely should spark some thinking.
While the acquisition of Tele Atlas makes a lot of sense in many areas for TomTom, I personally think they’ve exaggerated quite a bit when it comes to talking about an armada of loyal customers automatically reporting map improvements as they go.
