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By 21 April 2015 | Categories: news

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TomTom Africa is currently hosting its second annual Developer Day and User Conference at the Bytes Conference Centre in Midrand, and this year's two-day long event (21-22 April) will be focusing on the connected car and realtime database updates, amongst other topics. The free-to-attend two day event features lectures and case-studies by some of TomTom Africa's local and international partners, providing insight into the latest trends and best practices for navigation and location based services (LBS).

Coming together

Etienne Louw, GM for TomTom Africa says, “The Developer Day and User Conference plans to showcase some of the company’s leading mapping and location based services solutions. The theme for this year’s conference is ‘Real and Connected’ where we’ll be sharing findings on connected services plus look at real time database updates amongst other things."

Louw noted tha , "TomTom Africa and TomTom South Africa forms part of the Expansion Markets business sector of TomTom. This is a very exciting sector where we are often challenged by management to think out of the box and try new business models, explore new business partner relationships etc. In line with this we have been the forerunners in creating reseller agreements with companies such as deCarta and Micello to expand our technology stack and enrich our digital mapping solution offerings to the market."

Testing mettle

Along with the Developer Day and User Conference presentations, TomTom Africa will be organising a hackathon to showcase the potential of its solution offerings. "This is our third hackathon and this year the focus is on exploring the capabilities of both the TomTom Bridge (a ruggedised Android tablet with extendible TomTom navigation on board in the form of the TomTom Navkit SDK), as well as the various deCarta options to allow developers an opportunity to create something exciting and win a prize to the value of R20 000," added Louw.  

A winner of a previous hackathon, Infotech, will be demonstrating some of the integration they have done between the two platforms. Typical target areas for these platforms include the Rent Me (car/truck rental companies), Drive Me (truck companies), Bring Me (taxi companies) and Deliver Me (leasing/logistics companies) and system integrators interested in offering seamless backend integration into financial/CRM/ERP etc. systems.

User focused

The second day of TomTom Africa's event will focus squarely on the user side of the business, taking an in-depth look at what drives business’ logistics and transport needs and how application development can cater to these requirements. Keynote speakers from TomTom and one of its leading technology partners deCarta will also explore a range of topics such as:

  • How LBS technology can be used to improve business applications

  • Strategic insights into fleet management from a global and African perspective

  • Interpretation of traffic information and its applications from a business perspective

  • Effective road system management (tolling etc.)

  • The ‘connected car’ demystified

  • WhereIsMyTransport – a user-friendly app to assist people in locating reliable public transport

  • Traffic Index – a statistical overview of local and global congestion trends.


Other speakers will include representatives from IBM Bluemix and Infotech providing significant insights into fleet management technology and types of business strategy. Dr Johann Andersen, from the University of Stellenbosch, will explain how traffic data is used in a number of civil studies and SANRAL’s Manager for Toll and Traffic division, Alex van Niekerk, will give an overview into the world of SANRAL and how they utilise the traffic info supplied by TomTom.

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