We Are Developers World Congress 2019 Highlights

Once a year, 10,000+ developers gather in Berlin for the world’s largest developer event, We Are Developers World Congress. The event is comprised of 250 sessions and workshops, startup pitching sessions, expos, & talks from industry experts and tech pioneers. We were excited to talk to developers about building different with our Maps APIs.

Being Part of the World’s Largest Dev Event

Once a year, 10,000+ developers gather in Berlin for the world’s largest developer event, We Are Developers World Congress. The event is comprised of 250 sessions and workshops, startup pitching sessions, expos and talks from industry experts. In prior years the event has welcomed speakers like Steve Wozniak and Joel Spolsky.

This year, TomTom was proud to have our co-founder, Corinne Vigreux take the stage as a keynote speaker on the executive stage and have a large presence across multiple programs at the event.

In case you missed it, here are the highlights:

• Corrine Vigreux, spoke about “Technology for a Moving World”

• Louis Debatte-Monroy gave a talk on “Build Different with the Other Location Platform”

• We gave a full day workshop on our Maps SDK for Android, iOS & Web

• We held demos of our Maps APIs and did some fun giveaways at our booth

• Our talent acquisition team met with hundreds of brilliant developers

Technology for a Moving World

Corinne Vigreux opened up the executive stage with a keynote where she shared key learnings and advice from her experience in building TomTom. Some of the key takeaways include:

• If you have people telling you that “it is a bad idea” or “that it isn’t possible”, then there is a good chance you’re on the right track. She was told this many times prior to TomTom becoming one of the fastest zero to one million in unit sales product in the world – even faster than the mobile device!

• Invest in your technology. There will inevitably be waves of innovation in whatever field you’re in. if you stand still for too long, you will become irrelevant. Make sure you invest in your technology so that you can pivot when the time comes.

• Make sure you have a north star and that you and your team are crystal clear on what that is. It is critical to have a clear mission. This is what will help motivate you and the whole team. At TomTom, our mission is to create a safer, cleaner, and congestion-free world. From the time we started the company almost 30 years ago to today, this has always been what our company has strived for.

Build Different with the Other Location Platform

TomTom has become infamous and some may say, synonymous with navigation or GPS devices. Within the close to 30 years TomTom has existed, the company has continued to evolve and innovate. Today, TomTom is the only independent location data company providing services to companies like Uber, Microsoft, Alteryx, Toyota, Renault, Volkswagen and many more. We recently began offering our Maps APIs through our developer portal (developer.tomtom.com) and helping provide the building blocks and tools for thousands of developers to build location into their applications.

Louis Debatte-Monroy took to the Construction Worlds stage on day 2 to share why TomTom is the trusted alternative location platform. “With our expertise in mapping, pure focus on building the best quality location products, and passion for helping our developer community succeed, thousands are switching already today” stated Louis. “We’re happy to have start-ups, the size of 1 person to companies like Microsoft, one of the largest companies in the world all using our Maps APIs”.

This week, we announced some major enhancements to our Maps SDK for Web applications. These new features include:

• Advanced interactions: change perspectives with tilt and rotation features

• Fraction zoom levels: seamless zoom in and out experience

• Better performance: load faster while taking up less memory

At the booth & workshop

We had a terrific time talking with the hundreds of talented developers who flowed through our booth and workshop during the 2-day event. We showcased demos of our Maps, Traffic, Search, Routing and Geofencing APIs. On day 1 of the event, we held a full day hands-on workshop to help developers get started with our Maps SDK for Android, iOS, and/or Web. It was exciting to hear about the number of ideas and projects developers were working on and the various use cases in which they needed Location APIs.

Our talent acquisition team also had a great time talking with developers who were seeking technical roles in one of our 40 offices. Lastly, we held a Nintendo Switch giveaway contest, where contestants simply had to take a photo at our booth and follow us on Twitter @TomTomDevs, which resulted in a several creative photo entries. If you missed out on this giveaway, be sure to catch us at a future event.

Until Next Year!

From giving hands-on help to developers on their projects to sharing advice to hundreds on how to start their own company and how they can build different with TomTom Maps APIs, we had a blast at We Are Developers World Congress 2019 and can’t wait till next!