Map data is an important weapon in the mobile technology wars, and will also prove crucial as the connected car becomes another battle zone among map-making competitors. Just a few years ago, mapping was primarily used in the car for navigation. But now it enables everything from lucrative location-based services to game-changing autonomous driving.

Telenav is an important player in the mapping space and a navigation supplier to several major automakers. The company doesn't create its own maps, but instead adds value to existing map data by packaging it with proprietary features such as navigation capabilities, point-of-interest info and real time traffic.

Until now, Telenav has relied on large suppliers like Nokia and TomTom for mapping data, but this week it announced that it will be switching to the crowd-sourced OpenStreetMap (OSM) platform, which it described as the "Wikipedia of Maps." The switch to OSM has already begun with Telenav's Scout for iPhone navigation app, and it will be implemented in Scout for Android next month.

At its annual Waypoint event in San Francisco on Monday, Telenav provided a deep dive for media into its decision to go the OSM route and also described its benefits, chief of which is the ability to make changes to map data much more quickly. "We've lived through the struggle of quarterly and longer-frequency updates," said Rohan Chandran, Telenav's head of consumer products and global services. "We believe that critical mass has been reached with OSM and we can get near real-time updates. For Scout users, it will be a week or two initially, and we'll compress that over time so that they'll be driving and navigating with the latest maps."

Of course, the switch to OSM is also a business decision. "We expect there to be a cost benefit to it, both from direct costs and the scalability of it as we apply OSM across our platforms," Chandran said. "We'll have a single data set that maps the world, and not different data sets."

The other benefit is that OSM allows for more individualized detail. "We see this as a long-term play for Scout being more than just maps and road systems, as layers of rich information starts to accumulate," Chandran said. "Scout can become this personalized, community-powered experience—not so much a Wikipedia of maps, but a Wikipedia of places. We think the OSM platform and the community we're embracing will give us the power to do that."

Crowd-Sourced Maps go Global

Telenav noted that Scout will leverage a community of more than 1.6 million registered OSM editors who currently map nearly every country around the world and also guard against erroneous or even malicious map updates. "These are people who have pride of ownership in their region and they're watching it like a hawk," Chandran said.

"We have stories of people who have their phone set up for alerts when any map edit is made to a location and they go in and monitor it," he added. "It's been a very effective self-policing society, and if there's any hint that it needs formalization, that may happen in the future to control and validate [the data]."

Such crowd-sourced maps for drivers have the potential to become even more beneficial when a dynamic traffic-reporting element is added. Part of the impetus for Telenav's switch to OSM was its acquisition earlier this year of Skobbler, an OSM nav app available in almost 200 countries. Telenav also announced at Waypoint that the Skobbler app for iOS and Android will be rebranded as Scout in over 50 markets.

Telenav pointed out that in addition to someone using the OSM-enabled Scout app to send in mapping updates, they'll also be able to report traffic or accidents. This is similar to Waze, the crowd-sourced nav app that Google acquired last year for more than $1 billion, although it doesn't use open-source maps. This real-time traffic reporting capability, combined with the constantly updated map data, is where user-generated content can become crucial to in-car navigation.

While Telenav's OSM maps likely won't be available in new vehicles for some time, since automakers have product planning and production cycles that stretch up to four years, the technology will eventually come to cars. And if Telenav can provide accurate and continuously updated maps, and allow drivers to stay informed about traffic using crowd sourcing, it will have a powerful weapon available to win the mapping wars.

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