Telcontar Gets Personal with Next Generation Location Platform

Telcontar (CA, USA) has announced the availability of Drill Down Server (DDS) 4.0 platform and Traffic Manager 4.0, the latest version of its geospatial engine that powers Internet portal mapping services such as Google Local, Yahoo! Maps and Ask Jeeves.

The new DDS 4.0 platform represents a breakthrough in real-time location services by enabling proactive notification of relevant, real time data to users for routes that they use everyday. The Traffic Manager 4.0 extension allows users to integrate the most accurate traffic feeds available with dynamic detour routing from DDS 4.0 to take drivers to their destination as fast as possible.

DDS 4.0 enables personalised routes, giving users the ability to define favourite routes and then receive proactive notification of relevant information along those routes such as real time traffic, gas prices or custom offers from merchants. In the same way that one can have a personal watch list of stock prices or news, now it is possible to check favourite routes to see if traffic is bad getting out of town on a Friday, or to learn who has the lowest gas price on the commute home.

By combining DDS 4.0 with a standard Internet notification system, drivers can be notified to leave 20 minutes earlier, what exits to take, if streets should be used instead of freeways, as well as identify where the nearest ATMs and rest stops are located. Until now, this has not been practical due to the complexity of correlating time-sensitive data across potentially millions of personalised routes. DDS 4.0 offers a unique method of quickly and efficiently searching across stored routes to provide the first location platform that can scale to the volumes needed for the Internet.

Traffic Manager 4.0 further enhances the personalised routes by integrating traffic data from Tele Atlas, Inrix and NAVTEQ with advanced detour routing to get drivers to their destinations as quickly as possible. DDS 4.0 with the Traffic Manager 4.0 extension uses real-time traffic data in the routing calculations and is the first routing platform to explore detours around these incidents on surface streets as part of an optimised solution. The result is that drivers now can not only know what traffic to expect, but can know what to do about it, with routes that minimise their time on the road.