If you have seen a car driving around New Rochelle the last couple of days with a strange device sticking up out of the roof you might have been wondering what’s going on. Talk of the Sound caught up with the vehicle on Aberfoyle Road near Webster Avenue. The vehicle is collecting digital map data for NAVTEQ. The device on top of the car is taking photos from multiple angles
NAVTEQ provides map data used in portable GPS devices made by Garmin, Lowrance, NDrive, web applications such as Yahoo! Maps, Bing Maps, and MapQuest, automotive navigation systems for many car makers, and games such as Microsoft’s Flight Simulator. The company is the dominant player in the digital mapping space.
Founded in 1985 in Silicon Valley, California, NAVTEQ went public in 2004, and was then acquired in 2008 by Nokia. Today it operates as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Nokia Corporation, and is headquartered in Chicago, IL, USA with more than 5,500 employees worldwide. NAVTEQ is located in 202 offices in 53 countries.
A search of the area in Bing Maps shows that the area of New Rochelle being covered today by the NAVTEQ vehicle is not currently mapped at “street view” level. Presumably that will change once the NAVTEQ data is uploaded.
Keep in mind that if you are photographed by this vehicle you will be in their mapping software on many, many services for many years.
Persons’ Photographic Eyeview of Street Maps
This article refers to the images created by NAVTEQ being used by Garmin, Lowrance, NDrive, Yahoo, Bing, and MapQuest.
Google wasn’t mentioned. Most people I know, prefer using Google Maps to Bing, Yahoo or Mapquest.
Google Maps has had similar images associated with their maps, for a number of years. If NAVTEQ is not their source, then either another company will soon being photographing New Rochelle, or Google will continue to maintain its old maps.
My point is that if you might find a photo of yourself (or of others you know) in any of these maps, and different map companies might provide different inages taken at various times. In the case of Google Maps, this has been true for many years.
Not really…
There are two main players in this space: NAVTEQ and Tele Atlas. NAVTEQ is the map database for the brands mentioned above. Tele Atlas is better known in the U.S. as TomTom. Up until 2009, they provided the maps for Google maps. In 2009, Google began to collect their own map data (initially in the U.S.) and to roll out their own map products.
As for this being the case with Google Maps “for many years”, you have it backwards. Google Maps WAS Tele Atlas until 2008 and only began collecting mapping data in 2009.
NAVTEQ began in 1995, Tele Atlas began in 1994.
In any case, the point of this article is just to explain to New Rochelle residents what that car is doing as it drives around New Rochelle.
As you can tell from the photo, when this batch of images is uploaded to NAVTEQ and distributed to their customers, there will be a photo of me taking a picture of them taking a picture of me 🙂