“TomTom is thrilled that our partner deCarta is able to provide their sophisticated L2 service to mobile phone users which have been part of our and their business strategy for some time now” says Etienne Louw, General Manager of TomTom Africa. Louw added “We are seeing large mobile, telematics and automotive customers switch to L2 from other local search engines and geocoders such as Google and Bing”. deCarta, one of the world’s spatial data integration specialist companies, has been hosting and running the search service since early August 2014 using its advanced geosearch engine – L2, and has replaced the search service previously provided by Google. The service delivers millions of responses per day to this handset manufacturer’s local search and mapping application to users in over 120 countries. deCarta’s L2 is a high performance, scalable local search engine with single line input and intuitive user interface. deCarta sources and indexes map and POI (Points of Interest) content from a wide variety of sources globally but also enables customers to easily index, control and search on their own content. The deCarta service utilises TomTom map and POI content. L2 enables deCarta’s customers to offer flexible, advanced local search capabilities that are on par with Google Maps but beyond other search engines. The advanced search capabilities include: – Single line entry of POI or address or both – Fast typeahead, predictive entry – ideal for mobile devices – High tolerance for misspellings and partial entries – Random ordering of address parameters – Search for a POI near a POI such as “ATM near Nelson Mandela Square” – Search for POI near a specific address, e.g. “Parking near 1234 Main Street” Furthermore, L2 can be integrated with deCarta’s patented “Search Along A Route” technology. This combined with the ability to index custom content and boost result rankings gives Service Providers the ability to offer more advanced and helpful “Driver-Centric” connected car services.
