When in Rome - don't get lost

TomTom devices - including the iPhone app - feed real time traffic data back to Amsterdam. Photo / Supplied

While in Amsterdam I had a meeting with TomTom, the Dutch navigation company that has an app out for iPhone. I met Nick Saisanas, TomTom's marketing and communications manager for Asia Pacific, who had recently showed up from Australia for meetings (he used to work here in Holland) and Mark Huijnen, Product Marketing Manager for TomTom On-board Mobile.

The firm's latest innovation is HD Traffic, which offers on-the-fly re-routing around traffic problems as they occur. The system uses information from three sources - the first is the somewhat limited government system of loops embedded in certain roads to measure traffic speeds and volumes, plus accidents and roadworks. For New Zealand this info also includes earthquake indicators.

The second source is information furnished by connected TomTom devices which all send data every two minutes. There's a consumer device you can buy, the devices built into some cars, the TomTom iPhone app and the business solution for fleets. In New Zealand, this info is supplied by GeoSmart.

The third source is mobile providers, which send cell tower triangulation data. In countries in which companies like Vodafone take part, TomTom installs maps and software on top of their systems to divide territory into cells based on cell tower coverage. (This third source has not yet been deployed in New Zealand.)

But perhaps the most effective is the data sent back by tomtom's devices. All of them send trace data back to the Amsterdam base, where it is fused and filtered then applied to interactive status maps which upload back to the devices on the fly. Even from New Zealand, which sometimes offers faster send-back than France (this is due to the amount of TomTom users rather than network speeds). So if you are driving in New Zealand with a TomTom device or the iPhone app, that's polling back to Amsterdam and updates in 2.5-5 seconds.

I was shown an interactive (projected and touch-enabled) map of Brussels in real time (it was 8:30pm in Auckland on a Thursday night, so there wasn't much happening there). You could see delays, jams and even a stretch of motorway with a 35km tailback.

The data is used to reconnect back to the originating device which then recalculates to avoid the jams and slow sections, reissuing a new time to destination as it does so. The maps themselves are colour coded to show free routes (green) to slow (orange) to stopped (red).

The information actually improves as more people buy TomTom and join the data flow. They spread out through the world feeding the data back and forth. The information is so accurate that it can even show the slow part of a roundabout as it happens.

TomTom continuously monitors the data to benchmark by how much it's solving traffic flow information.

There's a network operations centre in Amsterdam and a duplicate in India to make sure the service is available 24/7.

I could have used this when a trip to Oxford from Cambridge took 2.5 hours there, but hit rush-hour traffic on the way back - same route.

The return trip took four hours ... Actually, the traffic here is unbelievable. I drove a car from Amsterdam to the north the day after the meeting. It took about 40 minutes to move 20kms out of the city as it was virtually a crawl. This was at 1:30pm on a Thursday - and people said be careful not to hit rush hour.

Mark Huijnen has been at TomTom over four years and was involved with the original development of the iPhone app. Their mission was to give people a TomTom on iPhone they could recognise from TomTom devices due to a similar interface, while also giving them an acceptable iPhone app experience. On a TomTom in-car device, there are six buttons, but on iPhone there's swipe, pinch and zoom, etcetera.

I've been using it extensively and had but one quibble: I put in a request for a semi-transparent compass on the screen. Several turns on English roads, for example, plus those be-damned roundabouts really messed with my sense of direction and I would have appreciated having an overview of which way I was actually heading sometimes.

One slight oddity of the TomTom app was explained: when you choose Address after Navigate To, you put in the city, then the street name, then the number. That's fine, but we New Zealanders (and English speakers generally) usually put the number before the street.

In Holland, it's 'Tesselchade Straat 9', not '9 Tesselschade Street'. TomTom is a Dutch company. It's a minor detail, but it threw me when I started using TomTom a year ago.

Before iPhone, Huijnen was making 'Navigator' software for PDAs like Palm and the Windows Phone. "It was more the business person who was using it, and you had to be, let's say, a little bit geeky to put it on."

For iPhone, TomTom hired experienced developers and iOS experts to build up in-house expertise. "With the first version, we concentrated on making the app stable. There's nothing worse than driving an the app crashes. And then we started adding in more advanced features.

"With the App Store, it makes it very easy to keep innovating and to add features from user feedback."

Huijnen also likes the way Apple has made it easy for developers to deploy new versions of apps. "iOS 4 unlocked more possibilities for us, like Departure Reminder, as it gave us access to the calendar. Then it unlocked access to the pictures." This means you can take a picture with your iPhone and use it like an address card to navigate to. This is under 'Navigate to>Photo'.

Think about that - snap a photo of a venue with iPhone (as it can GPS-tag the picture), send it to some people with TomTom on their phones, and that's all they need to get to the wedding reception.

That's extremely handy!

- Mark Webster mac-nz.com