Tele Atlas is going to start selling Tomtom speed profile data. This is the first sign of the acquisition having an impact on customers and potentially the geo-data market. The speed profile data is quite impressive, as described in a press release:
The speed profiles database is derived from almost half a trillion speed measurements that TomTom customers in 25 countries have been sharing with the company over the past two years, making it unique in terms of both size and richness. Today this speed profile database already provides highly accurate information about actual average speeds for every five minutes of the day on any day of the week on all of the roads in 23 European countries and 90 percent of the roads in the United States. To achieve this kind of accuracy, those 18 million kilometers of roads had to be driven and measured on average more than 2,000 times at different times of the day and during different days of the week.
This data should give companies an edge when routing their customers (it already assists Tomtom consumers).
This is just the beginning of the collaboration between the two companies. As mentioned here previously the acquisition makes the most sense when Tomtom’s devices are able to updates Tele Atlas’ data stores. The same holds true for the Nokia-NAVTEQ acquisition. The crowdsourcing of geodata is going to be a very common business practice in the future.