PocketGPSWorld.com at the TomTom Traffic Launch event

[MikeB]

Last week TomTom held a launch for the latest TomTom Traffic plugin for TomTom 3. A number of GPS Portal sites were invited, and we had a day of presentations in the TomTom offices in Amsterdam followed by a "booze cruise" around the famous canals.

The picure to the left shows the representatives from the GPS sites:
Marcel Timmermans of www.poihandler.com, Tobias Bischof of www.PocketNavigation.de, Guillaume Perrotin of www.GPSPassion.com,
Markus Schwarzkopf of www.Navigating.de, and of course, Mike Barrett of www.PocketGPSWorld.com. You will have to guess who is who though...

The TomTom product management team gave us a presentation of the Plugin, where it is now and where it is going in the near future.

Of the countries taking part in the trial the UK had the most users, nearly double all of the other countries put together. The most suprising demographic was that only 1% of users were female 99% were male. (This is obviously Bo Peep).

There were concerns about the amount of data transferred, and the main advice is to select smaller map regions that you normally travel in to restrict the download size. Another concern was the roaming charges, not too much of a problem for UK users, but for those who cross country borders within Europe for business the roaming charges do become an issue.

The general future for traffic is to have complete coverage of Europe and USA in 2005 though no mention was made as to Jan or Dec. And to add additional value added services onto the datafeed. This will also be rolled out onto the new Common Navigation Engine platform as released for the Palm and Go systems, although Go does not have Bluetooth so cannot connect to the mobile network at the moment.

Then we were appraised of the intracacies involved in actually supporting a product like this where you need to interface to an almots unlimited combination of PDAs, BT phones and mobile networks. Quite a challenge.

After that we had a brief tour of the TomTom offices and were shown amongst other areas the support group. TomTom have a call centre of 25 staff speaking 6 different languages.

We finished the day with the famous Booze Cruise, a chance for us to meet other members of the TomTom team, including the Harold Goddijn the CEO and Peter-Frans Pauwels the CTO. This was very valuable for us as it gave us all a chance to get to know each other and build relationships in an informal manner.

Hopefully this meeting has enabled us at PocketGPSWorld.com to get closer links within TomTom, and just as importantly to meet up with some of the guys doing the same as us in Europe.
_________________
Mike Barrett

[Howard]

"We finished the day with the famous Booze Cruise, a chance for us to meet other members of the TomTom team, including the Harold Goddijn the CEO and Peter-Frans Pauwels the CTO. This was very valuable for us as it gave us all a chance to get to know each other and build relationships in an informal manner"

I bet you all came off the boat in no fit state to get a GPS fix back to the hotel!

Howard

[Dave]

And the next product we're likely to see from the office of TomTom is TomTom Canal Navigator, safely navigate yourself around the canals of Amsterdam, coming Fall 2004!

[MikeB]

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