He Rocked the Mapping World

THE HARDER THE STRUGGLE, THE more glorious the triumph. But not many people have the courage to persevere in the face of failures.

Nor do they have the fortitude to not give up on their dreams despite setbacks. And there would only be a handful who have the wits to make their business sustain for 20 long years in startup-like conditions. A handful, like Belgium-born Alain De Taeye — the co-founder of Tele Atlas, the digital mapping company which was acquired by TomTom in 2008.

People take digital maps for granted now. They were not there to witness the time when map-making was considered an art, and map-reading needed skills. For long in history, many from Ptolemy to Piri Reis and Jodocus Hondius mapped the known world. De Taeye was one of the first to carry that tradition forward in the cyber world.

“For me, it was logical that maps would also become digital and the reason for that is that actually routing the algorithm already existed since the ‘60s. We had the tools to calculate all kinds of things, but we did not have the digital maps. So, it was a kind of logical thing to do to fill in the gap,” De Taeye recalls.

After graduating as an engineer architect from the University of Ghent in Belgium. De Taeye launched Informatics & Management Consultants as an IT consultancy firm in the late 1980s. But, he continued work on digital map databases and routing fundamentals to today’s satellite-based navigation devices.

Remembering those days brings a smile on De Taeye’s lips. “It sounded like a bit of science fiction in those days. Remember, I was in the ‘80s and we talked about the cars that will actually tell you to drive from point A to B and then people compared me once to the knight rider.”