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TomTom Flames OpenStreetMap
An anonymous reader writes "TomTom Navigation has a recently launched article on what they call the 'negative aspects' of open data projects such as OpenStreetMap. As there are no hard facts and details to the studies they refer, the OSM community identified this release as classic 'Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.'"
These are really common sense problems with open street databases. Everyone can edit anything and they are often built using unreliable hardware and software. Like TomTom notes, this can lead to serious problems. Imagine if some of those 'self-driving cars' would use them.
Don't get me wrong, Open Street Map is good. But these problems seem obvious. In some places, like where I live Open Street Maps works better than Google Maps. However, Bing Maps is the best one of them with most information and best UI.
FTFA: "We harness the local knowledge of our 60 million satnav customers, who can make corrections through TomTom Map Share." So... open mapping projects are worse than their closed mapping product because their closed mapping product is collaboratively edited by the users... Nice argument.
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The motives are obvious, the critique is not very specific, everyone who is using OSM does realize their limitations, and anyone who is using mapping software and gets in trouble because they prioritize the mapping data over what they can see with their own eyes should not be on the road anyway.
Too bad for Tomtom, but they stopped to be relevant quite a few years ago.
The oddest part, to me, is that they kind of admit to the same issues in TFA:
Our map-makers are real experts, many having over 20 years' experience in the field. And we harness the local knowledge of our 60 million satnav customers, who can make corrections through TomTom Map Share.
Surely a disgruntled employee can be do a better job at keeping disgruntled users in check, than a community of volunteers...
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Greetings and Salutations;
Well, I have been editing and contributing to OpenStreetMap for several years now, and, I have to say that while there is a point to the criticism, in general, I would disagree with their analysis. It is a bit too self-serving for my taste. I do not own a TomTom, but, have had a couple of Garmins, and, have used a TomTom unit before. The commercial maps have been no better than the Open Source maps, and in several cases have been far less accurate. There are a number of places here in East Tennessee where the commercial maps have the GPS insisting that I am driving through the fields on the side of the road.
One point where Open Street Map shines is that it has actual roads and trails in such places as National Parks and forests...where the commercial maps have nothing but blank green areas.
YAB - http://blog.beemandave.com/
"Many drivers rely heavily on satellite navigation for precise directions, and mapping errors can be extremely dangerous, particularly in the case of one-way streets."
I see people using these commercial quality navigation units every day and still they take stupid actions like driving into a oneway street and making last second turns (right... left, NO RIGHT swerving all over the road) while spending more time looking at their statnav than on the road. Turn by turn navigation is dangerous by itself when used blindly no matter what maps are being used, they induce a near total lack of anticipation of traffic.
Going by their argument, if community driven approach is not correct most of the time, then why do we rely on wikipedia? I have used various mapping softwares in rural places and they either report wrong location, or better still, 'No maps are available for this area' Bottomline: It is all FUD on their part of marketing their product.
Fuck Beta
Basically they say that they provide more "quality control" than OSM, and that people should check their electronic map, this is not false...
The arguments are very similar to the ones the various encyclopedias offered (and still offer if they haven't disapeared yet) against wikipedia.
But they do recognize value in OSM, so I guess they are more into thinking how in the future leverage OSM, after all the real competition to tomtom is not OSM but google map or bing map on the mobile phones....
They should focus on lowering the price of their hardware, who will pay at least 150€ for a satnav, when they can have something similar for 19€ on an android phone.
(since they need the phone subscription anyway, and yes the tomtom is probably "better", but 130€ buys quite a lot of gasoline, even at current prices).
Maybe they'll bring out a 50€ android + osm based navigator, and offer some fun "add ons"
They should worry more about Google maps/navigation. You get a smartphone with that on it, and suddenly a Tomtom doesn't seem like a good buy anymore. My mom has a Tomtom because she could practically get lost driving on a straight road, and it has worked well. However it has nothing on my smartphone with Google on it. Reason is that the smartphone can (and does) fetch map data in realtime. I don't have to remember to load maps for where I'm going and they'll be as up to date as Google has at the moment.
In terms of other features like plotting a route talking you through things and so on they both work fine.
That's their real threat. Anyone who has a newish Android smartphone already has this, and I have to presume it is available on all other platforms. It's free and it works well. You don't have to remember to bring anything with you, other than your phone which you probably already have. Heck even if you don't have the app you can download it in the field.
Between that and cars with built in nav systems, I can't see them having a market for much longer. Stand alone GPS units are going to be the kind of things that hikers use, if you are on a roadway your car, phone, or both will already have you covered.
I am ashamed of our marketing department
Reason is that the smartphone can (and does) fetch map data in realtime.
Yes it does, which is great right up until you are in an area with really poor data.
On any smartphone I will always have at least one offline mapping app, so that I can find things around me (or how to get out) even if data connections fail.
You can alleviate that to some degree with caching (which Google Maps does) but it still doesn't help if you want to search for something new or run into an area the caching did not anticipate.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm glad I have the tom-tom maps, and not OpenStreetMap. They are so accurate, that the TomTom maps try to take me through a tunnel not yet open (and not due to be open to end of this year). End Sarcasm.
How can Tom Tom claim their maps are accurate? They're far from that. Speed limits totally wrong. Intersections that don't exist. And don't get me started on the route planning. I have a brand new tom tom which I use in Brisbane Australia, and it will get something (if not more than one thing) wrong on every journey I've used it on.
Bring on the open community I say!
I bought a WinCE PDA with TomTom back when they first appeared.
I later got a new version of the TT software for the same PDA.
Later I bought a TomTom device (still a WinCE PDA, but only running TT).
Then I bought an Android phone and... TT didn't have an app, so I got a different brand.
TT's enemy isn't some open mapping service, it's their own failure to adapt to the changing world around them.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
The fact that Tomtom feels the need to bring up OSM says to me that OSM is now a credible competitive threat to them. The business model of selling maps for use on gps units is rapidly becoming obsolete, they can either try to fight it and become increasingly irrelevant, or adapt...
Incidentally, what i dislike about tomtom is that having bought the device, i needed a code to register my map, and this code was on a tiny sticker attached to the sleeve of a cd that came in the box... When my sdcard died, i replaced it, reloaded the software and map, only for it to refuse to work unless i entered the code. I still have the physical device, but have no idea where the code is (most likely lost) so am left with a relatively expensive device that i now cannot use via official channels.
Ofcourse, i simply found a crack online which allowed me to use the device i paid for without the tiny strip of paper containing an arbitrary code.
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I have a TomTom and a month ago visited Cyprus. I did not find map for Cyprus. The only thing I have found in TomTom forum was a discussion if Cyprus is in Europe. O.T. It did not make to slashdot, but TomTom's had a nasty GPS bug after last DST switch. To get a GPS lock you had to cold start it.
The one thing that sticks in my mind about Tomtom: when they got sued by Microsoft, the open source community rallied round. But did they ever bother making the minimal effort to distribute a Linux client, perhaps to show appreciation if nothing else? Appreciation not just for the support they got against Microsoft but for giving them a free platform to build their business on? No. Too much to ask, apparently. As far as I am concerned, Tomtom can fuck themselves.
Oh, and when I lost my Tomtom I did not replace it, I bought a Garmin.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I have been working with digital map data for on advanced driver assistance applications for a few years, and my experience is the following:
Some applications want lots of data. They don’t care if it is perfect or not, such as whether there is a zebra crossing, a traffic light, a stair, a path for mountain bike but not for road bike, etc. One example of this is navigation: it doesn’t matter if the turn has an error of 10 meter, if it is 10 or 25 degrees to the right, etc.
Other applications they are fine with less data, but this must be absolutely accurate to within a meter. Examples of this are active-safety applications, such as map-based adaptive front lighting, curve warning, etc.
Some other applications are in the middle. They are not very sensitive, but annoying if incorrect: example of this is speed limit warning.
The biggest map vendors collect hundreds of attributes at very high quality. This is true particularly for low-number functional classes (highways and motorways). They often meet the 5-m absolute and 1-m relative accuracy for geometry.
It is very difficult for OSM to meet this high quality, specially because you need a differential GPS (DGPS) to collect these. That said, map vendors invest most of their effort on large important roads, while rural or off-roads have from low to very poor quality.
Moreover, one thing is the quality at which data is collected, and another one is the map quality. Vendors tend to decimate (strip-out) geometry points on non important roads in order to reduce the size of the map.
So to sum up: if you are on a motorway or highway, OSM probably won’t match the quality of Navteq, Teleatlas or Google. If you are on a rural area, off-road, bike trail, etc., OSM will probably kick everyone’s butt. Plus it is usually more up-to-date.
TomTom tries to close this gap with their community content, which I find very dishonest from them. They save millions by using people’s data, but they don’t pass these savings back to the consumer.
The problem, as I see it, is that the non-tech savvy have already realised that computers are just machines and fail all the time (just like any other extremely complex piece of machinery).
What many people fail to grasp is that a GPS is also just a computer (and thereby a machine). People seem to view it as "the magic map box that was invented at Hogwarts", and view the underlying technology as being satellites that sense where you are and feed you the right picture. Heck, they even talk about "the Google satellites".. and TV shows aren't helping
This is just a basic misunderstanding of what the technology is, and that leads to this insane blind trust.
People don't know that the GPS isn't actually talking to a satellite, and that the maps are just pictures made by someone and loaded onto the device.
The people here at /. are a bit more tech savvy than the average person, and we actually care about this stuff. Most people don't. They just want their HogwartsBox to tell them where to go in the voice of Professor Snape (okay, so do we, but we know how it's done and that the limitations are...)
I've made the mistake of buying U.S. maps from TomTom twice. Fooled me twice, so shame on me.
In both cases, I needed TomTom to get me to hotels in the south east, where the hotels are located on roads that were created about 3-4 years ago. Google Maps had the roads, but even the most recent update of TomTom did not.
So I emailed TomTom and I was like, hey, your maps are really stale regarding this address. Their response? "Here's how you can correct our maps."
Excuse me, but I'm not paying ~ $50 for the privilege of correcting your maps. If I take the time to show you where your maps are wrong, and I can point your customer support people to the correct data on Google Maps, you do the damn work of updating your fscking maps.
I've found TomTom quite useful over the past few years, but I really can't see continuing my business relationship with them.
I bought my first TomTom (and last) a year ago, was instantly out of date map wise missing some fairly major chunks of motorway network that had been completed locally 6 months before purchase. No new maps were sent only tiny small updates. Khants the lot of them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street
This attack was mainly targeted at Waze (surpassed Twitter (!) in the App Store), which has around 20 million users, and becoming a real threat - OSM navigation is not nearly that popular (yet?).
xer.xes -- 4181
I'm not trying to say that smartphone navigation will take over the world. I knew a bunch of people would respond ascribing me that position right after I posted but oh well. I'm saying that it will take over Tomtom's market.
The Tomtom isn't a device that hikers, surveyors, etc buy. It something you buy to get GPS in your car. It is designed around the idea of car sat nav. Well guess what? When you are sticking to city streets, cell coverage is usually pretty good. Even if it drops for a second, it'll pick back up fast enough. No problems there.
In terms of foreign travel, again not the market for a Tomtom. People don't tend to pack these things along to then put in their rental car (presuming they even elect to get a rental car) because you can get one with the car, that has all the maps (Tomtom charges for maps).
Like I said: Their market is car sat nav. They aren't like Garmin who are targeting people who go off the beaten path (literally). The market they are in is the market where Google Nav works great.
OSM seems way less of a threat to them than that. As a simple anecdote: I was considering getting a car GPS. I don't drive a whole lot, I bike to work and can walk to most stores. So often when I am driving, it is to some place I've never been that isn't near where I live. Car GPS would be nice. I'd put it off since they were kind of pricey and I could solve the problem with a pen, paper, and online directions before leaving. However as the price dropped I thought maybe it would be something to have for convenience.
Then, I got my smartphone. I now have zero desire to own one. It takes care of everything perfectly. I have no reason to spend the money on a separate nav system and in fact a good reason not to in that I never forget my phone. It completely eliminated my interest in a sat nav.
You are right, that when I go visit my parents in Canada I can't use it, unless I want to pay roaming charges... However I wouldn't use it anyhow. I don't plan the driving around, it is their turf, they take me around. If I was going to do any substantial amount of driving I'd rent a car, not use their car, and in that rental I'd get a sat nav.
Many years ago a freeway bypass was opened near my home: so to access the freeway I do not need to cross the city center. When I bought a TomTom device in 2010, I noted that the bypass was not yet added , so TomTom always plans a route thru the city center: I added it manually and suggested as a correction - but no official correction was ever issued. Last summer I forked another 70€ to buy a map update, in hope that it would add this correction: but no, I wasted my money. I am deeply disappointed.
The title should be: TomTom fears OpenStreetMaps
And by FUDing on them TomTom just really said that OpenStreetMaps are serious competitor and TomTom can soon be out of the business.
of any service that doesn't turn our personal data over to the police. The reliability of commercial services in selling private data to law enforcement is unsurpassed, and it is a fatal flaw of OSM not to do the same thing.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
Of course, now I have RTFA I know there ARE applications out there that can give me some serious benefits for travelling .. so I am now downloading Waze to my Android phone .. oh my.
I have to actually LOOK at the road I'm driving on? I can't simply go down the flooded road 'cause my navi says it's all right?
What's next? First they want me to pay attention to the traffic, now this! Driving sure gets more complicated every day.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
... at leading me to some unsuspecting granny's rural driveway when taking me to Mammoth Caves, Kentucky. The mailbox tipped me off. Don't expect the cave bats order off Amazon. That reliable *closed* data will probably never get updated till a news story surfaces about a clever old girl giving paid tours of her cellar.
If anyone knows the meaning of FUD, its the slashdot crowd. Likely the only acronyms used more often in discussion here than FUD are MAFIAA and BHO. It's a waste of space and time to expand it.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Of course, I'm sure that TomTom licensed it properly, rather than just swiping some 'freely' available data for their own commercial use.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
It took me about 20 seconds to track down a paper that supported the Tom Tom blog, how come no one else did. The biggest problem with open source projects like OPM and Wikipedia are the people who deliberately sabotage data for their own twisted reasons. Projects like Tom Tom and the other closed source systems can check important data changes made by users. Some open source projects end up with malware written into the code by creepy losers. In reality these lamers are undermining the entire open source community. Even worse, the Open Source community refuses to acknowledge and address the issue. Tom Tom points out the issues and the community vilifies them, ignoring the problem and in that ignorance refusing to address it. Without a doubt the future of software is in open source, but, that future depends on the communities ability to sift out the creeps who suppress information, insert false information or sabotage the code. Recognize the Problem. Address the Problem. Check the Problem. Do Again. Basic people, basic.
Another tremendous Open Street Map feature is that we get the data. When I need a map specific to my needs (treasure hunt for the kids, map for a flyer, etc.), I go to open street map, download the map as an SVG, open it in Inkscape, add/remove features, crop, edit to taste, save as PDF, mail and/or print.
Thank you, Open Street Map!
However it has nothing on my smartphone with Google on it.
How much does your smartphone cost per month to use? Sure, I'll grant that it can make and receive voice calls, unlike a dedicated navigation device, but so can a $60 per year dumbphone that has its own battery. But how much per month does one pay for the ability to "fetch map data in realtime"? Is a $360 per year[1] data plan for a smartphone cheaper than what TomTom and the like charge for periodic map updates?
[1] Source: VirginMobileUSA.com, comparing payLo to Beyond Talk plans for someone who uses very few minutes.
The last bold point is my favorite. "we harness the local knowledge of our 60 million satnav customers, who can make corrections through TomTom Map Share." Using people who apparently cannot navigate on their own is on par with Webster hiring partially literate editors.
Tom-Tom, Google and the rest should not even be topics in this discussion. The issue is this: when are we, as tax-payers, going to agitate for our Nations, States, Provinces and municipalities to do the map updating and maintenance? After all, these are the bodies who are actually responsible for the roads for which we have, and continue to, pay dearly for. They have the most accurate raw data. They schedule repairs and maintenance. They should maintain their sections of the worlds' roadways.
*** Don't be dull.***
Dear TomTom, we have awaited your introduction to Android since forever. Your Windows Mobile navigator was excellent but Android version never came. And now it is up to OsmAnd and OpenStreetMap to fill the void. Welcome to irrelevance.
http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl/ :(
"Private Garmin", yes, but quite the opposit attitude as concerns Openstreetmap.
And it works: My dezl does drive me, turn by turn, with this.
Too bad the dezl is so buggy that at the present time I just cannot manage to get the speech back
Herve S.
As the proud owner of an international model XXL 540 TM (IIRC... basically a midrange lifetime maps/traffic device), I can honestly say tomtom sucks.
The device is mostly ok, when it works. The problem is the map and firmware update process is so fcked up as to make the device unusable for non computer geek mortals. There is probably a 50% chance every-time I update it, that it ends up broken. Just go to the tomtom forums and look at the list of complaints. I could go on for hours about what is wrong with the device, but the summary is that, even with the "free" maps the hours you will spend updating it, and fixing the stupid crap that breaks, means your probably better off just throwing the device away every couple years and buying a new one.
All I can say is thank god for internet forums where people have figured out how to fix one bug or another by standing on their heads and doing some nonsensical thing. Otherwise I would have thrown mine away years ago.
Basically, I won't be buying another TT device, at any price.
TomTom's main claim to being better than OSM seems to be the care and effort they put into keeping their database accurate.
My experience with Navteq and TeleAtlas in trying to get an accurate depiction of the road I live on leads me to question this assertion. My road is broken in the middle by a dirt jeep trail, impassable to all but 4WD, high clearance vehicles, which was not shown in database, causing routing software to believe a route existed from one end of my road to the other. I can't tell you how many delivery drivers claimed my house didn't exist, because apparently their routing software took them in at the "low number end" of the street, assuming they could drive through to my house (which is on the "high number" end). Delayed packages, airport limos that didn't show up, friends coming over and calling to report they couldn't find the house -- apparently, all the GPS companies, including Google and Yahoo maps, are based on the same data.
The good thing about this, is that I only had to convince two database companies that there was a change needed. The bad part was that it took literally *years* of submitting the same change to these two companies (and receiving acknowledgements) before they did anything, and another year before I saw the change reflected in Google and Yahoo databases. GPS units which haven't been updated with a new database will still take folks the wrong way, but at least I get my packages now. We still need to tell delivery people to come in from the "high number" end. And their dispatchers still fail to note that on their delivery sheets, so we still get the phone calls. But not as often.
I call BS on TonTom's assertion that their database is somehow more accurate than the crowdsourced one.
No one's stopping them from creating a TomTom app that uses their puportedly superior maps, uses the GPS already in many tablets and cell phones, that syncs with actual TomTom hardware to suggest user rated locations based on previous travel history or listed interest, shows you on your App's map and then syncs to your TomTom in the car where you're supposed to meet your wife for your anniversary dinner as soon as she updates it on her phone, facebook, or TomTom App, etc.
They don't realize the advantages they've had all this time and never bothered to reach out and try to make it happen. Instead, some dork in PR wrote some thinly veiled demagoguic rhetoric to try to poison the well against their legitimate competition in what passes for marketing these days. TomTom has no advantage because they haven't worked for it, and if they want recognition, they need to earn it the right way, by using their resources wisely.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
...that GPS is a one-way system, right? There's no link back from your TomTom to the government's satellites or the corporate mothership.
0 1 - just my two bits
I have a cache of Paper Maps.
So do I. It's a nice backup, but a worse backup than an offline smartphone map.
But it's always there
While you are on foot? When you transferred into someone else's car or on a metro?
I don't think so. Paper maps are an OK backup, but again not nearly as valuable as an offline mapping app on a smartphone.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Which is why you cache the data beforehand if you know you are entering such an area.
Even IF you are so prescient, AS I SAID you lack the ability to search for anything while you are there.
If you drive around the U.S. much at all outside major cities this is NOT a theoretical concern.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I find it doesn't matter anyway, because the places were you find you've know data are usually the same areas that you don't need detailed instructions in - e.g., highways through rural areas.
If you are visiting someone in a rural area THAT is where it matters most. Because the roads al wind and are not in an easy to decipher grid like a larger city.
It's exactly going through rural areas that I have made the most use of offline mapping apps, for search and just simply to get me to where I was going.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
P.S. I realize now you might have been talking about hiking. In that case I still use the smartphone as a GPS but yes I do always carry paper maps with me if I'm going anywhere there's any possibility of getting lost...
I'm just talking about everyday use when traveling around.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Great use of strategic ellipsis. You conveniently cut the sentence that speaks directly to the point you're making, so you can accuse them of hypocrisy by not addressing it.
The VERY NEXT SENTENCE after your selective quote: "The result is a map that makes extensive use of community input – but community input that’s moderated and controlled by specialists."
Which is the difference between curated collaborative content and open collaborative content. But by all means - ignore it if it makes your snarky point.
Anytime you read a comment and it is by someone who has never posted before and he supports Microsoft it is someone who is being paid to post that.
Who knows if it is true or not, the person posting doesn't care, he just wants a paycheck.
What I have noticed as well is that closed source maps tend to be woefully out of date compared to OSM. I was doing a mapping project and was using Google maps to try and verify against to make 100% sure on some features, and entire apartment complexes that have existed for 5+ years were not on the maps.
Has anyone pointed out that most hardcopy map publishers include thousands of very small "mistakes" in their maps, as a way of tracking copyright violations. Aside from the software to display the maps, the map data itself is the most valuable part of the system, and once you have that data you can copy it like free speech, errors and all. And when publishers introduce "newly corrected" editions, they simply change the mistakes around.
Are there GPS units that use OpenStreetMaps data?
TomTom has excellent customer service. Google has none, and can lead to numerous deaths:
http://www.npr.org/2011/07/26/137646147/the-gps-a-fatally-misleading-travel-companion
OpenStreetMap suffers for the same reason, customer service is self serve. That's actually a step above Google.
Joseph Elwell.
This is reply to TomTom FUD
TomTom: from PND to FUD
http://www.systemed.net/blog/index.php?post=23
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The Broadcon firmware error should have been caught by quality control at TomTom.
What compelling advantage to TomTom devices have over Android Phones with Google Maps?
That depends. How much do TomTom map updates cost compared to $30/mo for a data plan?
since they need the phone subscription anyway
Not all phone subscriptions are smartphone subscriptions. The price difference between my current Virgin Mobile USA phone subscription and the cheapest subscription for an Android phone (with a data plan) is about $30 per month. I use a dumbphone on a $15 per 90 days payLo plan, and the cheapest Beyond Talk plan is $35 per month.