[Talk-us] Telenav goes OSM with Scout

Martijn van Exel martijnv at telenav.com
Tue May 20 06:30:20 UTC 2014


Hi all,

At Telenav we have started making the switch to OSM today, as you may have seen around the web and twitter.

I am really excited about this, not only because I have been working at Telenav for the past two years to help make this happen, but also because the project that I have been a proud contributor to for all these years has finally reached a stage where this is now possible.

What does this mean for you? Well first and foremost, you can now use Scout, a commercial grade navigation app that is used by tons of people every day, to get around, knowing that it is powered by your favorite map. The iOS version is undergoing the OSM switch right now, the Android version will switch in June.

As an OSM contributor, you will of course start noticing that your OSM edits will make it into Scout. Not right away, like the map on osm.org; we currently update our maps every two weeks. That will get better as we get more comfortable with the rapid update cycles. Also, not all OSM edits make it into Scout. Most importantly, Scout search results are not powered by OSM yet. This is likely to change in the future, but I don’t know when yet. 

We have done a good chunk of work improving OSM to be ready for this, mostly in the very same way everyone here improves the map: by opening up our favorite editors and manually editing the data[1]. But also by analyzing the data and pointing out errors, which we have started to feed to MapRoulette. Speaking of which, I have had the opportunity to work on MapRoulette quite a bit, as well as other smaller  things such as the Battle Grid, Relation Pages and Brave Mappers. I mostly hear these things are useful, and we value all your feedback enormously as we think of more ways to support the project. 

But more than anything really I want to say thank you! Thank you first and foremost for being the great mapping community that makes OpenStreetMap what it is - not only the best map of the world, but also a place to make friends and have fun. And thank you for being patient with us. Along the way, we have at times bombarded this list with questions and suggestions on how to improve certain aspects of OSM, and we have relied on your wisdom to help us make sane decisions in our efforts to improve OSM.

This process surely does not end with today’s switch - if anything, we’re just getting started. There is a lot more we can do to help improve the map, especially now that we are getting so many eyes on it. And there is probably a lot more to learn for us along the way. I am looking forward to it.

Drop me a line if you have any questions or comments, or to let me know your experience with Scout. Looking forward to hearing from you! 

Martijn

[1] See my colleague Kristen talk more about that in her SOTM US talk: http://stateofthemap.us/session/telenav-osm-editing-experiences/
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