VDO Dayton dev team move to TomTom

According to the 'Eindhovens Dagblad', a Dutch journal, TomTom will take over a part of VDO Dayton. Ninety VDO Dayton employees are set to change camp and move to the Amsterdam company. The paper also claims TomTom will move a large part of it's development department to the city-centre of the Dutch town of Eindhoven, and that by the end of this year, TomTom research should consist of around 200 individuals.

Harry van de Kraats, Personnel and Organisations manager at TomTom, indicated that the company had considered moving it's entire development department to India, but the move would have taken four to five years to complete. "We don't have that kind of time", says Van de Kraats in the Eindhovens Dagblad. "We have chosen Eindhoven, because of the development climate in the software and electronics area, and the knowledge in the automotive technology area. We will continuously increase our combined efforts with the automotive industry, and the subcontractors in that sector."

Cabbage

TomTom currently employs about 850 people of some thirty different nationalities. The company is still growing like a cabbage, and it's expected that, by the end of this year, TomTom will employ about 1,500 individuals, of whom 500 will be in the research and development department. The largest part is the group currently still working in Amsterdam, but TomTom products are also being designed and created in London and Taiwan. The PND's themselves are built in China, where last year a new TomTom device saw the light of day every second. At that speed, close to five million units were manufactured in 2006.

The new group of developers who will be located in Eindhoven, will concentrate on making the navigational devices 'more active'. In the future, the devices will continuously grab more and more exterior information and show it on their screens. Currently it is already possible to show data like the weather forecast, traffic information and road works, but that is just the beginning. Of course the technological developments won't stop at that, and lots more ingenious and accurate solutions are to be expected.