Mapping giant acquires bright techy future
GPS technology brand TomTom today announced a partnership with French routing specialists Mappy, which will access the navigation giant’s live traffic data, continuing a long-term relationship between the companies.
Mappy’s traffic data will now include the whole of Europe, considerably improved from just 10 countries previously, through a map and traffic licensing agreement. This could lead to Mappy leveraging TomTom’s next generation of map database for its own mapping site and mobile consumer app.
The app will now offer over five million POIs (points of interest) across France and Western Europe, gives routing calculations for all kinds of transport modes from cars, bikes (owned or sharing services), public transport, trains, long-distance buses and even car sharing. It also delivers on-the-move services like hotel and restaurant booking, click-and-collect services for consumer goods in partnership with retail chains, and recently launched the first single comparator tool for all transport modes, for all distances, throughout France.
TomTom has also recently bought German-based Autonomos, a driverless vehicle start-up firm. These two ventures could see the Amsterdam-based navigation tech monolith make considerable in-roads on designing autonomous vehicles.
One of Autonomos’ early projects crosses the boarder into Mexico. Policia inspeccionar.
Autonomos, established in 2012, has provided research and development consultancy work for automated vehicle assistance systems, as well as a fully demonstrated autonomous driving software, 3D sensor hardware and digital image processing technology.
A number of like research projects were the early work of Autonomos at the Free University of Berlin. TomTom CEO Harold Goddjin said the deal opened up enormous opportunities for the company he also founded.
“This is an important development for TomTom as it will help us to continue to strengthen our capabilities for the future of driving and expand our knowledge and expertise,” he said in a press release.
“With this deal we are further positioning ourselves as one of the leaders in autonomous driving.” (Pun intended?)
Autonomos was founded by a leading robotic laboratory workgroup inside the Free University Berlin and is a tier-1 autonomous vehicle component supplier with over 30 software engineers. It now contributes to future high-definition mapping technologies, and is engaged with OEMs.
