Tele Atlas

» see teleatlas.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Every navigation product of the 2000s was standing on one of two databases, and most people using them never learned either name. One was Navteq, out of Chicago. The other was Tele Atlas, founded in 1984 in 's-Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands, with its working headquarters later in Ghent and its American arm in Lebanon, New Hampshire. The product was roads: where they go, which way traffic runs on them, where you are allowed to turn, what the speed limit is, which of them is called what this year.

That work does not photograph well and it does not finish. The company had cartographers under contract in nearly thirty countries by 2007 and drove camera cars around to check reality against the file. Its last self-description, still sitting in the archive from 1 January 2011, says the database spanned more than 200 countries and territories. Revenue in 2007, the last full year before the takeover completed, was 308 million euros with 24.4 million of net income. Headcount that year is given as 1,889 in one place and 1,628 full-time equivalents in another, which is about the level of precision the public record offers on this company generally.

It listed on the Neuer Markt in Frankfurt in May 2000 under the code TA6, which was where European technology companies went that year, and added a Euronext Amsterdam listing with a first trading day of 18 November 2005. In May 2000 it also bought Etak from Sony. Etak is worth naming because its Navigator, from 1985, was the first automotive navigation system of any practical significance, and it reached Tele Atlas by way of News Corporation and then Sony, neither of which had worked out what it was for either.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the bidding war ~

In July 2007 the Tele Atlas board accepted an offer from TomTom, the Dutch satnav maker, reported at around 2 billion euros. On 31 October Garmin counterbid 2.3 billion. In the first week of November TomTom came back at 2.9 billion, and on the 16th Garmin withdrew and signed a long content agreement with Navteq instead. TomTom's final number landed roughly 900 million euros above the offer the Tele Atlas board had accepted in July, and nothing about the thing being bought had changed in between. It was the same roads, surveyed by the same people out of Ghent.

The European Commission cleared the deal unconditionally on 14 May 2008, having worried in the opposite direction from the one you might expect: that TomTom would be able to hurt its competitors by raising the price of the Tele Atlas database or restricting access to it. The offer went unconditional on 5 June at 30 euros a share, settled on 10 June, and the Amsterdam and Frankfurt listings terminated on 30 July 2008.

~ the map under the map ~

The customer worth naming is Google, which signed a five-year agreement in June 2008. In October 2009 Google announced it was dropping Tele Atlas data in the United States in favor of its own, assembled through the internal survey effort that became Ground Truth, and Tele Atlas confirmed it publicly in a single flat sentence. The OpenStreetMap mailing lists called it a data earthquake at the time, which reads as overstatement until you notice that the brand had fifteen months left.

Here is where I can reach this story, from an angle nobody intended. My own work is drone computer vision, so georeferenced data and what it costs is a thing I think about on ordinary weekdays, and the easy thing to forget is that for about twenty years the road network was a commercial product with two vendors and a price list. You did not survey the roads. You licensed them, per country, per update cycle, from Ghent or from Chicago. The reason that feels foreign now is that Google worked out it would rather go and drive the roads itself than keep paying for them.

~ the week the name went ~

There is no press release for the end of Tele Atlas, and I went looking for one. What exists instead is the archive, and it is unusually clean. On 1 January 2011 teleatlas.com served 22,508 bytes titled "Digital Mapping & Navigation Solutions, Tele Atlas", with a heading reading About Tele Atlas and the company's own name appearing 149 times in the body against 4 mentions of TomTom. On 8 January the same URL served 14,624 bytes titled "TomTom Licensing", heading About TomTom Licensing, with the brand appearing 45 times. The 53 remaining instances of the old name are internal content-management identifiers and URL paths, not branding. The TomTom stylesheets were first archived in the same crawl.

Those are the only two captures in the window, so the funeral can be dated to a week and no closer. The domain itself was left running for most of another year: as late as 9 December 2011 it still answered with a page that rewrote its own address bar in JavaScript, and the first server-side redirect to tomtom.com appears on 22 December 2011. That redirect's content fingerprint is byte-identical in every capture for the next two years. Somebody set it once and never came back.

The logo was an orange square with a white goose flying across it, carrying a small rider on its back. Anyone who has read Selma Lagerlöf will recognize the image: a boy shrunk to the size of a thumb, seeing a whole country from above because that is the only way a whole country can be seen at once. A mapping company chose that mark, and a satnav company deleted it over a weekend without telling anyone.

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