That's a lot of customers up for grabs for the two companies, one proudly declaring its aspiration to put wheels on every road in America, the other boasting that its employees almost never leave the office.
Cell phone manufacturers are starting to install GPS, too. The cartographic competition has suddenly become intense.Īt least 60 million people regularly consult online maps, and last year 1.2 million cars were sold with built-in navigation systems, a number that has quadrupled over the past three years. But Tele Atlas, which until recently competed with Chicago-based Navteq the way that Burger King competes with McDonald's – making much the same things in much the same way – has decided to plot the world by starting with the electronic news alert instead of the steering wheel. Navteq, the biggest road-map maker, still does it that way. Maps have long been created by people driving around and marking their trails, as if working a giant Etch A Sketch. The project may make Williams sound Dilbert-esque, but he's actually part of a shift in the way that road maps get made. That information will then become accessible to computers, GPS devices, and, one hopes, the car navigation system used by the UPS delivery guy in Indiana. The soft-spoken 34-year-old is employed by the world's second-largest street-mapping company, Tele Atlas, and each discovery Williams makes – 30 to 40 per week – soon ends up on a map of the country. An email has arrived containing a newspaper report that a particular one-way road segment in northwest Indiana is changing from westbound to eastbound. Today has been slow, but suddenly he lights up. His search terms aren't the usual fare, like "Hilary Duff." They're more like "Tulsa city one-way" – queries that will help Williams track down announcements of road changes reported by local newspapers. Williams stares at his email inbox: a solid wall of news alerts from Yahoo and Google. SLOUCHED IN AN undecorated cubicle in Lebanon, New Hampshire, sleeves rolled up on his button-down shirt, David Williams is looking for one-way streets.
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