TomTom is a Dutch manufacturer of automotive navigation systems that was founded in 1991. Apart from stand-alone units for cars they develop also mobile navigation apps as well as business solutions. On June 11, 2012, at a product launch of iOS 6 it was announced that TomTom would be the main mapping provider for Apples new Maps App. Their revenue in 2011 was over $ 1.2 billion and they are massively into big data.
TomTom MapShare
On an average day, TomTom receives approximately 5.5 billion anonymous GPS measurements through all its devices. These measurements are sent by the products TomTom Home, the mobile app, In-Dash Navigation, Business Solutions and Connected PND, which are used by over 60 million customers worldwide. Next to that, TomTom has developed the community MapShare, which makes it possible for users of the TomTom products to report changes on the roads they are driving. They can report changed speed limits, new street names, blocked roads, new traffic directions and altered traffic directions. Already in 2005 TomTom started with this crowd sourced data. TomTom did not only ask users to report traffic information, since 2005 it has also been collecting trip information that was collected by the TomTom SatNav. Every time when users docked their SatNav their anonymized information was sent to TomTom. This allowed them to collect 5.000 billion (5.000.000.000.000!!) items of trip data. Big Data at TomTom is seriously Big Business. This is how 5.000 billion data items look like:
Courtsey: Business Wire.
Map Speeds vs Actual Speeds
All the data that TomTom collects is used among others to provide an actual and up-to-date picture of the local traffic. First of all, due to the massive amounts of data points they receive each day, they are able to show the difference between Map speed and Actual speed; the maximum speed that is allowed on a certain road vs. the actual speed that people drive on that road. Quite often there is a difference between the two.
This same information is used to determine how long it will take drivers to go from A to B. This is very relevant information as especially in The Netherlands traffic jams are monitored by the duration of delay instead of the length of a traffic jam. TomTom is able to measure the duration of a traffic jam by monitoring the GPS Speed measurements of the drivers on the road. Of course, this requires again massive amounts of data.
Selling Location Data
The historical data was not only used in favour of the drivers. In The Netherlands, TomTom confirmed that they sold the historical speed data that had been captured by its SatNavs to the local police for a short period of time. The police use this information to determine the location and frequency of the speed traps, but after complaints by its users they ended this policy rather soon again.
Open Map Data
Just recently, TomTom announced its latest endeavour in using the crowd to improve its products with big data and to improve mapping apps. They have made its vast mapping data available to apps developers, thereby providing an alternative to companies that now use maps from Google Inc and Apple Inc. Using the software is free for trail basis, but afterwards a fee is required.
Taking Big Data to the Extreme
TomTom has been capturing incredibly vast amounts of data for quite a long time now and all this data is used to improve, in real-time, the driving experience of its customers. Without the full use of big data, TomTom would probably not have been able to survive these days due to the fierce competition of free navigation apps. Luckily, in time they decided to harvest their big data crop and put it to use correctly.
