Map Services Take Personal Direction

As car navigation devices become more commonplace, users are looking to personalize the data displayed.

GPS device makers and digital mapmakers are jumping on the trend by offering new types of location data, ranging from free Wi-Fi hot spots to photo-enforcement traffic cameras.

Cobra Electronics COBR is touting its proprietary database of red-light and speeding cameras in Europe and North America for its GPS, or Global Positioning System, devices.

The two leading digital mapmakers, Navteq NVT and Tele Atlas, are increasing the points of interest they include in their maps using third parties and through their own efforts. Tele Atlas has created a content library where people and companies can post geographic databases that list such things as nightclubs, gas stations selling biodiesel, parking lots and garages, and historical points of interest.

And GPS device maker Garmin GRMN has a Web site for developers and content providers who want to make their applications and data compatible with Garmin systems. One Garmin tool lets people submit points-of-interest databases.

"Points of interest are becoming a more important part of the map product offering," said Cliff Fox, a senior vice president at Navteq. "It's not only 'How do I get there?' but 'What is it that I want to choose to do?'"

The key is quality rather than quantity of points of interest, he says.

Navteq splits points of interest into two categories: core and extended. The core set covers things most everyone wants, such as hotels, restaurants, gas stations and ATMs. The extended set has everything else, such as specific retailers.

Navteq has 1.7 million core points of interest in 63 categories and about 13 million extended points of interest in more than 80 categories.

With the growing popularity of navigation devices and the explosion of geographic data, users will want to personalize their devices much like they customize their Internet home pages with services like My Yahoo, says Dave Marsh, director of mobile navigation at Cobra.

Navigation device users will add the types of restaurants they frequent, items they're looking to buy and other data to the gadgets, he says. Portable navigation devices are moving from helping people get from point A to point B to being a "more useful tool in everyone's everyday life," he said.

GPS and digital map firms foresee much of this new points-of-interest data as being free or included in their base prices. Other niche location data will be sold.

Navteq is working with large chains such as Starbucks SBUX and Walgreens WAG to get the most up-to-date information on locations.

Chicago-based Navteq has developed a secure Web site where companies can update their own store information. It has signed up 27 companies covering 60,000 locations for its Direct Access program. It expects to have several hundred thousand such points of interest by early next year, Fox says.

Soon, Navteq will be asking those companies to provide more information about their locations, such as hours of operation, credit cards accepted, menu items and specials.

Netherlands-based Tele Atlas, which is being acquired by GPS device maker TomTom, saw the boom of location-based data coming, so it created a program for companies and people to upload their geographic content. With ContentLink, third parties can share specialized lists of points of interest ranging from the best Thai restaurants to historical grave sites, says Jay Benson, vice president of business planning for Tele Atlas.

"There are so many different types of content that people want to start adding that it's more than what we can manage and produce ourselves," Benson said.

Navteq and Tele Atlas sell their digital maps to navigation device makers and Web site operators.

Device makers like Garmin and Cobra are reluctant to add points of interest to their gear that they haven't verified. They don't want to turn off customers with bogus data.

"The trick is to make sure the information is accurate," said Garmin spokeswoman Jessica Myers.

For now, users will have to download most of this customized data off the Internet and add it to their devices manually. But soon a lot of this information will be beamed wirelessly to navigation devices.

Already many navigation devices come with wireless access to dynamic content such as real-time traffic and gas prices.

"We'll see a migration over the next few years to more and more connected devices," Benson said.