Tele Atlas Thai subsidiary to map region

Database News - Wednesday December 19, 2007

MAPPING / NAVIGATION SYSTEMS TO TAKE OFF IN AUTOMOTIVE SECTOR

Tele Atlas Thai subsidiary to map region

DON SAMBANDARAKSA

Tele Atlas has set up a subsidiary in Thailand to develop the market and create better maps with traffic flow and actual images of the country in what is expected to be a booming region for mapping in the next few years.

In an exclusive interview, Arnout Desmet, Tele Atlas's managing director for Asia South, explained how every country has its challenges, but the Thai road network, with its many flyovers and restrictions, posed a challenge that could only be tackled by having people on the ground rather than by studying maps. He said that with Thailand being the "Detroit of Southeast Asia", it is by far the most important market and he sees growth exceeding 100 percent a year for the foreseeable future.

Going forward, Tele Atlas plan to upgrade the Thai office into a regional competency centre to support the whole Southeast Asia region from Thailand.

Car makers such as BMW and Daimler-Chrysler, which sell the same car all over the world, want the same navigation system to work in all markets. Hand-held consumer electronics is a secondary market, but will need a new generation of hardware and storage to take advantage of all the developments in the pipeline before it truly takes off.

"APAC is a very important market. Various analysts estimate that the market for mobile navigation will be 100 million by 2012. This is sizeable and it is a market where APAC will outgrow the US and Europe," he said.

One of the hottest developments today is 3D visualisation. Rather than 2D maps, landmark buildings and roadsides can be shown in the navigation interface, very much like a first-person shooter game. This can be useful for navigation, or it could be turned the other way and used for games based on real cities.

Another new trend is pedestrian navigation. In the region, the number of potential pedestrian users outnumber cars. Pedestrian overpasses and underpasses have to be mapped and in many cases, such as Hong Kong, can be quite different to the existing road maps.

Another market is multimodal navigation, or integrating static roads with time-based train, bus and subway information. And an area that is more active in Europe is integrating real-time traffic information into maps. This could be thorough the Radio Data System Traffic Message Channel or even through GSM/GPRS networks. Such maps with realtime data are already in use in Singapore, Korea, Japan and Australia.

Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) is an area which we can expect to see carmakers put into their high end vehicles in the next couple of years. This can be as simple as intelligent speed warnings that use maps with speed limit data to warn if a driver is going too fast, to intelligent headlights that actually swivel and follow the curvature of the bend, not with the steering wheel, based on knowledge of how the road curves.

In the logistics sector, automatic transmission control will help the car select the right gear based on gradient information, anticipating gear changes before the driver would normally initiate it. This may sound trivial, but it has been proven to reduce fuel consumption by 2 to 5 percent - significant for the logistics sector.

The telecom sector is also an important market and Tele Atlas sell maps to them at three levels. Telcos are looking to location based services to counter the falling average revenue per user. In the region, most telcos today have between 9 and 10 percent of their revenue from data services and more creative services will lead to more data consumption.

Tele Atlas has direct relationships with many handset manufacturers to help guide development and also works with application providers who host maps on servers and provide a service that is accessed through the mobile phone.

Google is a client of Tele Atlas and thus Desmet is more than happy with the popularity of the free Google Maps and Google Earth, as ultimately his company gets paid. It also greatly helps increase awareness and popularity of location based services.

Asked about the new European Gallileo satellite navigation system - which promises increased accuracy over the US GPS system - Desmet said that the real significance will be more signals and better coverage in built up areas, which sometimes struggle to lock on to GPS satellites.

As for the Thai THEOS mapping satellite, he said that it was still early days - the first maps from THEOS only went on sale in November 2007. Tele Atlas is now looking at the resolution and terms of use of these maps. "We believe that it can be of use for the mapping of land use and land cover," he said.

Bangkok Post