TomTom today announces the availability of TomTom Traffic in four additional countries: Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and United Arab Emirates. With this expansion to South East Asia and the Middle East the service covers 41 counties but this number includes states like Andorra, Gibraltar, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Vatican City and San Marino.
Ralf-Peter Schäfer, Head of Traffic at TomTom commented:
We are excited to announce the launch of TomTom Traffic in four key emerging markets, where we know traffic congestion is an issue. Our aim is to help drivers get there faster and support governments to better manage traffic flow.
Adding real-time traffic data for a whole country means that TomTom had to license a whole traffic service from a 3rd party data provider, or get a 3rd party probe data from fleet management and security companies. It seems that its worth it as Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Thailand and United Arab Emirates are four of the fastest growing markets for car ownership and production in the world so these are definitely prospective markets for TomTom.
source: TomTom
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Six years ago Google introduced Google Maps API. It allowed third parties to build 3D tools on the top of Google Earth. Last week Google announced that it plans to retire the API in December, 2015. Ken Hoetmer, Product Manager of Google Maps APIs commented:
The Earth API is built on a technology called the NPAPI plugin framework, and recently, for security reasons, both Chrome and Firefox have announced they’re removing support for this framework.
Even tough over the years we’ve seen many cool projects like DataApeal, the fact is that Google is killing something that’s already dead. If new versions of Chrome and Firefox don’t support the API, the plugin simply won’t work on those.
We hope that Google will release an alternative to the Google Earth plugin. Many plugin users have already started to migrate away from it to other technologies, such as the Google Maps API, or Cesium, but the best features of Google Earth API aren’t replaceable.
source: Geo Developer Blog
