Tele Atlas
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| Wholly owned subsidiary | |
| Industry | Geographic information systems |
| Founded | 1984 |
| Headquarters |
's-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands (corporate) Ghent, Belgium (operational) |
| Products | Digital mapping data |
| Revenue | €308.0 million (2007) |
 €25.0 million (2007)
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| Profit |
€24.4 million (2007)
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Number of employees
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1,889 (2007) |
| Parent | TomTom |
| Website | www.tomtom.com |
Tele Atlas is a Netherlands-based company founded in 1984 which delivers digital maps and other dynamic content for navigation and location-based services, including personal and in-car navigation systems, and provides data used in a wide range of mobile and Internet map applications. The company competes on a global basis with companies like Navteq, as well as with local map suppliers in individual countries. Since July 30, 2008, the company has been a wholly owned subsidiary of automotive navigation system manufacturer TomTom.
The company provides maps, some sourced from other mapping companies, covering two hundred countries around the world, providing mapping data and "Map Enhancement Products" such as points of interest and address points. Clients of Tele Atlas include makers of automotive navigation systems as well as mobile and internet companies which provide mapping services. The firm also supplies data to clients in the public and private sectors who rely on geographic information.
The company keeps its data up-to-date in part through a fleet of dozens of mapping vans equipped with "six cameras, two side-sweeping lasers and a GPS navigation device." The vans capture about three photos per second while traveling at normal speeds, resulting in more than 100 million images per year from each van; the images are stored on one of two hard disk drives within a metal cabinet inside the van, drives that hold about two weeks of data. Meanwhile, the 3-D scanning lasers record the width, height and contours of the first reflective surface they encounter, producing data that when combined with the images create a three-dimension representation. Three-dimension representations are already available in Japan and Western Europe; people at the company's U.S. headquarters in Lebanon, New Hampshire, near Dartmouth College, expected in August 2009 that by the beginning of 2011, devices based on Tele Atlas data will be able to depict the surroundings in photo-realistic detail.
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Wikipedia