TomTom Introduce Travel Live Services at IFA 2011

[MikeB]

Just before the 2011 IFA Expo in Berlin last week TomTom announced additions to their Live Services portfolio. Building on the success of the Live Traffic TomTom have now added Live Travel Services. Effectively this is an integration of Expedia, Trip Advisor, Yelp and Twitter. The services allow you to access information from the portals directly on the TomTom SatNav. This dramatically increases the amount of information available on your journey, and is integrated into the navigation engine.

Unfortunately it would appear as if TomTom have simply bolted the services on the their navigation functionality rather than stand back and look at how a user would likely use the service. For instance having found a hotel on Expedia having gone through a search and selection process the natural thing to do is check the hotel out on Trip Advisor. This is where the whole system is disjointed as you now have to go back to Live Services then do a search and select using trip advisor. A much more natural usage model would be to link to Expedia and Trip Advisor from the POI details rather than having to restart the search from scratch.

That aside the information looks good and can be a valuable addition to the navigation experience. The services will be launched in Germany and USA as a trial before being rolled out to the other countries where TomTom Live is available.

Our video features Stephane Hareau, TomTom Director of New Products showing us how the new Travel Live Services work.

<iframe width="560" height="345" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/4I37EOvPm10" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

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Mike Barrett

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