Next Step – Fix the POI
OK, you’ve got the GPS, and the maps are finally updated enough to have your street, but you’ve got another problem that you didn’t know about; the Points of Interest (POI) are old or inaccurate. I am not pointing the finger at either major mapping company; I've seen inaccuracies on both.
There are a lot of reasons NOT to display all POI on the map as you are driving:
1) The map would be cluttered with all kinds of icons, and
2) You’d see that the POI are not perfectly located where they should be.
On some GPS units, you can elect to turn “on” the POI icons, showing an icon or lately little version of the brand symbol, which is cute at first, but left unchecked, can you imagine what Times Square might look like on your GPS? Better get a high speed processor in the GPS to draw and redraw all those little icons.
So, as more of these brands let you download their icons, you’ll need to be able to shut them off too. I have the Dunkin Donuts icons on my TomTom ONE XL, and I have to say that as the only icon on the map, life is good. Lay on a few dozen more brands and my GPS would be an unreadable mess.
The next step will be to fix the locations of the POI. A lot of people may not realize it, but many of the POI that I see are off by a subtle bit that taken as a whole could really add up to a dissatisfied user. A gas station on the wrong corner, a store on the wrong side of the street, is fine if you navigate to those places once or twice in your lifetime, because you may never notice the anomaly. If they are displayed on the screen for you to see; you’ll see the inaccuracies everyday as you drive by losing faith that the GPS can navigate you to a location in a trustworthy way.
Solution: Crowdsource the POI
The fix could involve driving vans, and mapping images against the existing POI set along with registers of business addresses. The other fix, and one that I would work into later releases, is something akin to MapShare from TomTom. The software that allows you to unblock a road, or add a road where there isn’t one should eventually let you edit all aspects around POI (they already let you rename, delete and add/change phone numbers of POI). This will be the ultimate solution, and with millions of installed users, accurate POI could be right around the corner.
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Posted by Scott Martin at August 7, 2007 9:09 AM
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