Tele Atlas Enriches Points of Interest with Stable of Leading Brand Icons; Program Boosts Location Content with Accurate At-a-Glance Brand Recognition

Business Wire, Nov 4, 2005

SAN FRANCISCO -- Tele Atlas, a leading global geographic content provider, today announced at the company's Partner Conference in San Francisco its Brand Icon Program, designed to provide at-a-glance brand name recognition for a rapidly expanding roster of businesses. The program enables consumers whose solutions utilize Tele Atlas map data to quickly and efficiently identify the most frequently sought-for points of interest (POIs) - including food, gas, lodging and retail establishments - in an easy-to-view icon format. Tele Atlas solution partners benefit from the Brand Icon Program by their ability to provide richer location content to their customers.

Tele Atlas' existing Premium POI product provides millions of validated and accurately located points of interest. With the addition of brand icons, available through an optional license from Tele Atlas, application partners can incorporate brand recognition into POI functionality, enabling end users to instantly identify destinations based on well-known business logos.

"With Tele Atlas' Brand Icon Program, Pioneer navigation end users can easily and readily identify a range of businesses based on familiar logos," said Keith Burnett, vice president of product planning for mobile entertainment at Pioneer Electronics (USA) Inc. "The program offers travelers a richer, textured, more efficient means of finding a location among the many compelling points of interest from the Tele Atlas map data."

The brand icons are delivered to a highly pre-qualified opt-in audience that is actively seeking branded services on their automotive, personal and wireless navigation devices. Tele Atlas has a catalogue of leading companies currently enrolled in the Brand Icon Program, with plans to grow the program and expand its capabilities.

"As the navigation, telematics and location-based services markets continue to grow, the ability to easily pinpoint a specific location or service on a map becomes an ever more important attribute for our business partners to provide their customers," said Mike Gerling, chief operating officer, Tele Atlas, the Americas. "Tele Atlas works directly with each brand owner to update locations and carefully place the brand icons within the context of our digital maps, adding a level of rich detail to the map data previously unavailable to consumers."

Separately, Tele Atlas today announced the availability of its new Point Address database - a powerful and accurate data set that pinpoints street addresses to a physical building, site or parcel. Tele Atlas' Point Address data allows developers to greatly enhance the value and usefulness of their geo-location and navigation products and offers end users a faster, more accurate method for locating street addresses.

Together, today's announcements demonstrate Tele Atlas' continued effort to provide the rich data that end users are requesting to enhance today's feature-intense applications.

About Tele Atlas

Founded in 1984, Tele Atlas is a leading provider of digital maps and dynamic location content for a variety of navigation, location-based services and geospatial products and database solutions. The company's database is a highly accurate reproduction of today's street network, enabling turn-by-turn route guidance on a high percentage of European, US and Canadian roads. Tele Atlas' compatibility with major navigation systems and its open system design have made the company's technology adaptable to both consumer and business-to-business applications. From logistics to marketing to traffic and fleet management, in almost every sector of today's business and consumer world, Tele Atlas has built a reputation as an acknowledged pioneer and leader in the digital map industry. For more information, visit www.teleatlas.com.