Navteq on Fox News

They said they have 700 people roaming the roads collecting data on new/changed roadways??? And it takes years to get a road changed when we send them the info??? Maybe for job security somebody hides our input.

I don't think so. They have to physically go out and verify every report and then capture the gps information themselves. Tough to do with only 700 for the whole country.

And I would assume they spend most of their time verifying in major metropolitan areas. If you live in a more rural area, they may never actually verify it but wait for the local municipality to update the official maps.

Some TomTom's have a sort of sharing feature that lets users contribute map updates that are then downloaded by all. Sort of the same concept as this site, only for map updates. When announced, we all had concerns over what would happen if someone accidentally or maliciously contributed incorrect data. For this same reason, Navteq isn't just going to take our word for it when we submit corrections. They have to verify the accuracy of the data before they publish to all. However, with tools like Google Earth, many of the submissions could be verified via satellite view. Still, it has to be a really big job to verify them all.

Better them than me hahaha

Sounds like it could be a fun job to tour our great nation and geocode it.

As with any job, it sure will get old after awhile.
Being away from family and friends. You get the idea.

I still like to travel around for work (mainly to get out of the office). However, if I had my choice, it would be 3 weeks in, and 1 week out. However, in reality, it is either in for a long time or out for a long time...neither is great!

However, I can say that travel can get very tiresome, esp if you have to deal with airlines. At first I thought it would be really cool, but found that I went to the client's site and then back to the hotel. there has only been a few times where it has actually been fun time, like atlantic city and new orleans, I got to gamble both times and had fun.

A lot of those satellite photos on Google Maps, etc, are older than the maps themselves, so they can't be counted on to verify anything. The high definition photos are only available in selected regions too, and in most of the low definition areas it can be hard to even follow a freeway, much less any smaller road. I've even found some strange seam blends where photos are poorly aligned when stitched together.

All in all, a resource to be taken with a few grains of salt.

No kidding. Still, I have found the satellite views to be invaluable in verifying addresses and in tweaking coordinates. I live in the Chicago area, so we're fairly blessed with reasonably recent satellite views that are hi-res. In my usage, I find that the sat views allow me to adjust the actual coordinates to a more accurate position in the majority of the local POI's that I create.