TomTom Takes Home Three Awards for Developer Portal and Maps APIs

TomTom was honored with three awards from both the Developer Portal Awards and API World Awards for our work on our Developer Portal and our APIs. A year after we launched the Developer Portal, we are excited to be recognized for our products and user experience.

Three Awards in Three Days

Earlier this month, we welcomed three new awards in our offices in San Jose and Amsterdam. One was awarded to us by the API World Awards and two from the Developer Portal Awards.

Over a year ago we launched our Developer Portal for developers to easily gain access to our APIs without extra obstacles. To receive awards for Best Overall Developer Portal, Best Business Model and Best IoT APIs one year later, is a reminder that we are on the right path in providing users what they need and want.

A big thank you to the API World Awards for recognizing us for the best IoT APIs and another thank you to the Developer Portal Awards for recognizing us for Best overall Developer Portal and Best Business Model.

To celebrate these awards, we met with our Head of Developer Portal, Gregory De Jans to chat about what it’s like to receive this recognition after leading the team for the last year.

How has the Developer Portal evolved over the last year?

Our Developer Portal started as just a product page, filled with information and no action. Our first step in the journey was to change the page to a self-service platform for developers to learn, evaluate and purchase our APIs all within a few minutes.

By introducing a portal that allowed users to try and then buy without contacting sales or having to wait long periods of times, we noticed that more and more people were coming our way to try our location services.

With more users signed up for the Developer Portal – what was next?

With more people coming our way, we wanted to make sure they had more ways to interact with us and other users on our site. Community building is a very important aspect of a Developer Portal, by integrating a blog and a forum, we enabled developers to connect with each other.

These two elements have been introduced this year and it’s been fun watching as our community works together to answer questions, build their projects and just chat about all mapping related topics.

What’s the secret sauce – how did you win these awards?

This award is a nice reminder for the entire time that their hard work is paying off and also very much appreciated by experts in the industry. With that being said, the “secret sauce” is the people behind the Developer Portal.

While we have been enhancing the user experience for Developers, that would not have been possible without every single person who works on it. There are multiple teams working very closely together to make the portal successful. It’s demanded close cooperation between our Developer Marketing team, the Product Marketing team and the Development team.

What’s next for the Portal and the team?

We are always working to improve the developer experience for new users and our community. We have an ambitious plan to continue to revamp our entire developer portal in the coming months where we will heavily focus on improving the design and developer experience. We will also enhance our developer portal with more content and testimonials to showcase the many companies which are using TomTom Maps APIs today in their applications.