Sounds like it quite a bit of work. I'm sure any update Navteq puts out won't have the POI search thing fixed. They'll just be updating map data and poi listings.

 

True, but once the work has been done for one, it will be done for all (in theory anyway).

 

For one edition of the map. But POI's don't seem to get updated regularly so it may not matter much. There are gas stations listed in my area that disappeared 10 years ago.

 

Okay... I think I've finally managed to get this stuff working. I ended up completely trashing the PMN program and just building all the database files and editing the DVD file structure for myself (i.e. manually). PMN seems like it's not quite ready for prime time to me (close, but not quite there yet). I'm sure what I'm trying to do with it isn't really what it was build for anyway (and so I'm not complaining).

So... It's a LOT of work and it's going to take me a while to pull it off, but so far, I've managed to create a new map DVD that has a "SEARCH ALL" top-level category and then a "ALL ..." sub-category for each of the other top-level categories within it (e.g. "ALL BANKING AND SHOPPING", "ALL DINING AND ENTERTAINMENT", etc.). You can then select one of the SEARCH ALL sub-categories and do a search of ALL the POIs within that particular top-level category. The searches seem almost as fast as they are for a normal search which is very cool!

One of the problems I'm currently facing is that I'm running out of space on the DVD and I'm not sure if it's going to be able to hold all of the top-level categories in a "SEARCH ALL" structure. I was hoping that removing the Rolls-Royce and/or BMW POIs would free up space but it doesn't. It turns out that all of them are simply sharing the same databases and they're not being duplicated (as I originally thought). I wonder if the MINI nav systems will read Dual-Layer DVDs? I'll have to give that a test. If they do, then space will not be an issue for sure.

I'll keep plowing through it and I'll continue to let everyone know how it goes. I still have a few stumbling blocks to overcome, but I'm getting there.

 

I think that there's a basic problem here with the premise that a navigation system should be able to replace directory assistance. It never will. If you are looking to go to a specific location, call them up, check their hours, make sure that they can handle your requst, ie. item is in stock, etc. Then punch in the street address and you are on your way.

POI's are to help you with common, general requests by motorists. Want to know how many miles to the next rest area on the Interstate? Easy, once you've done it once.

Like Birdman, everyone who uses a nav system can think of several ways that they would like to have it customized for their use. For example, I would like to search for a POI only within 1/4 mile of my planned route. These features are improving with new navigators, but if all desired customizations were available, I believe the interfaces would be way too complex for the average user.

Is Birdman saying that most of Pep Boys 592 locations are on the DVD, but simply poorly categorized? If so, I doubt he'd risk 10K. Somebody will find it if it's truely there.

 

Not necessarily true.

I often rent Hertz cars and get their "neverlost" nav system. It has a yellow pages catagory that truly is like looking it up in the book form, then it navigates you to the location.

I like it because it REALLY can find just about anything. Not sure what system they use, but it really is nice. Is it perfect? NO, but darn close

As far as my MINI Nav, haven't really used it much but plan to and will put it too the test...Like the Lexus system, the Porsche system will also find the POI and then dial the number for you via bluetooth and connect you to the business, say a restaurant, allowing you to make reservations virtually handsfree. I hope the MINI system will do as much...

 

I totally disagree. I use the Nav on my wife's Lexus -exactly- as a directory service, and it does the job incredibly well. It even dials the business # of the POI for you (BT integration), should you need to talk to a human. Not sure if the Mini Nav does that - still need to a aquire a Mini compabible BT phone.

 

Actually what you just said is entirely possible with most automobile nav systems.

My handheld 76CSx with City Navigator software loaded can find any POI, give me the full address, telephone number, etc for pretty much anything. You can search just by name, no matter what category some thing might be under. Same thing for my Nuvi 660. With the Nuvi it will even dial the phone for you. The Mini's system will also dial the phone number of a POI it finds. It's problem is just locating POIs since they are categorized very badly, making most of those 6 million POIs on the disc un-searchable

Being able to not only find that restaurant in a town I've never been, have step by step directions, and have it start the call to make my reservation; is pretty common for most automobile navigation systems (Garmin, Tom Tom, Magellan, etc).

 

There are only 3 Pepboys that are findable on the Mini. There may be 592 on the DVD, but the Mini's search function is only going to find those 3 I posted earlier in the thread. There is no way to locate the others using the Mini interface.

And no, I haven't gotten the 10k... :impatient

 

You really oughta fight for that $10k. You DID meet the challenge as it was stated.

 

Things might start changing quickly due to huge interest from cell phone companies. According to Business Week:

The two companies supplying that data, Chicago-based Navteq and Netherlands-based Tele Atlas, are now being rolled up. In July, one of the largest car-navigation outfits, Dutch concern TomTom, moved to acquire Tele Atlas for $2.3 billion. Stock in rival Navteq soared on the expectation it would be acquired by Garmin, TomTom's Olathe (Kan.)-based competitor, or perhaps Google or Microsoft, which operate mapping sites. But on Oct. 1 phone giant Nokia jumped in with an $8.1 billion deal to buy Navteq--a price nearly 14 times its $582 million in 2006 sales.

 

A small update...

I ran into a HUGE roadblock where I couldn't get the newly created DVDs to be able to search the custom "SEARCH ALL" categories I've created by name (or partial name). Once any text was entered into the "Part of name" search field, nothing would happen when I clicked the Search button. Obviously this problem was detrimental to what we are trying to accomplish here as not being able to search by name (or partial name) would make the search all changes completely useless.

I tried for hours and hours to figure out what was causing the problem to no avail. Finally, I contacted the author of the PMN program (Ivan), reported the problem and helped him to be able to reproduce it. Within 24 hours he had a fix for me that worked. Absolutely AMAZING! Now THAT'S what I call customer service.

Needless to say, I'm back to using Pimp-My-Nav now and things are back on track. Searching is very fast (as long as you limit the scope/radius of the search to a reasonable distance like 25 miles or less - larger radius searches, like more than 100 to 500 miles, are taking around 30 seconds or less) and so this is definitely doable. I just need to clean things up a bit and I'll have a completed DVD that I can use to show everyone the end results.

Woo hoo...

 

Awesome work! Now find all them Pepboys!

 

Very cool OfficeMaven! I was going to start building my "All" folders as you described in your previous post but now I'm wondering...Was PMN's "fix" related to the NAV DVD or to their software? I was under the impression that you were giving up on the PMN app?

Is it still possible to do this manually, or is that unrealistic? Thanks!!!

 

That's great news. Sounds like PMN is going to earn some $$ from me once you've got things completed!

~Neal

 

Just got back from travel.... almost fell off my chair reading this crap.

Man, you guys are NUTS!!! IF you think for ONE second MINI will not be forced to fix this, you are HUGELY mistaken. The class action lawsuit is being prepared as we speak. Trust me, it WILL be fixed, BY MINI, NOT ME!!!! (and not Officeman).

Now a few things:
1. MINI is GOING TO FIX THIS PROBLEM. OR, give me a $2,100 refund, along with anyone else who has purchased this NAV system.

2. TOMLINY, Are you out of yoru gord??? Have you EVER used any other Nav system on the planet? I suggest you go down to your local MINI dealer and search for ANYTHING on the planet on the $200 Garmin unit now on display. You WILL FIND, ANYTHING. You will find it by NAME, you will find it by LOCATION,, you will find it by CATAGORY. You can even find CATAGORIES if you wish. And you will understand how to use the inferface the VERY FIRST time you try a search. There is NO LEARNING curve, for anyone. IT is NOT difficult to use. I do say, I find your statements more ignorant than some of the REDICULOUS statements the MINI customer service has sent to me regarding this.

3. I said 75% of the POI's on the DVD are "hidden" because they are mis-catagorized, or stored improperly to the poitn that you would NOT find them when doing a normal search. For example, the $10k winner, found a PEP boys under RENTAL CARS. You would NOT normally search for an auto parts store under RENTAL CARS now would you?? So from my standpoint, it is HIDDEN from us. And for that reason, the attorneys have found this to false advertising among 4 other law issues, the most important being "intention of product".


Now, I find it VERY DIFFICULT to beleive MINI has not responded to this thread. I STRONGLY suggest they not only respond, but give us a plan and approximate date as to when we can expect to receive FIXED SOFTWARE for our NAV system.

It would save them litterally millions of dollars (and EURO's) to FIX it now, then to fix it later after some costly litigation.

 

Oh, almost forgot.

Office, be carefull with this!!! Modifying this data is a breach in Copyright laws!! This is why MINI will fix this problem.

That's one of the worst parts of this problem. We are not even ALOUD to fix it by ourselves. And if we do fix it inspite of the law, we DEFINITLEY can't give a copy of it to anyone. Navtech would go after you in a NY minute. So each and every one of us, would have to spend $40 on the PMN software, installing it, learning it, spend HOURS on end moving the data around, burn a new DVD..... all to fix a problem with a simple nav system we spent a LUDACRIS amounf of money on $2,100!!!!!! This of course assuming we all have a DVD burner, and pc with the hardware required to do all this....

 

Just curious Birdman, it's been asked before but I haven't seen an answer yet...what exactly is Mini's contractual obligation that is being challenged here? What and where were these obligations posted/written/guaranteed?

 

I've tried... There doesn't appear to be any in the POI database. Same for Apple stores.

 

Yes, let me finish up the work I'm doing on this one and then I'll post a how-to that shows exactly what I did. No need to reinvent the wheel and so I wouldn't waste your time working on this until I'm done. I've spent WAAAAY too many hours on this already, but I think it will be worth it in the end.

BTW, I'm up against my next (and probably final) roadblock right now. It looks like we're about 200 MBs or so short on disc space on the DVD in order to replicate all of the POI categories in a Search All menu. I'm also under the impression that the nav computer won't read dual layer discs and so I think I'm running out of options on this one. I'll continue working on it and see what I come up with (there has to be some other data that can be removed from the DVD somewhere).

As for PMN... Yes, I'm back to using it. I tried going the manual route, but I ran into the weird unable to search by name problem that I mentioned above. I couldn't find any way to resolve the problem, but the author of PMN did (I believe it has something to do with the way that the IDX and URL database files are created). Thus, I switched back to using PMN. Also, without PMN there's no way to export all of the existing POIs out of the database files on the DVD so that we can use them in our "Search All" menu. Thus, it's definitely a must have program for our project.

 

Yes, and they deserve it! It took a whole LOT of work to figure all this stuff out and then to build the program. As a software developer myself, I know that first hand. $40 is VERY cheep for what the program does.

 

Yes, I knew that going in. However, I'm not too worried about it at this point. I'm definitely not planning on stamping out fixed DVDs and sending them out. My intentions are to do a nice write up that shows how to fix it for yourself (which you are right is still illegal, but I'm willing to chance that).

I've also entertained the idea of wrapping up the PMN project and just making it available to those who have purchased a copy of PMN and can provide proof that they do indeed have an original nav DVD (i.e. not a copy). I'm still not sure on that one though.

The problem is that since there are so many POIs, the exporting and importing of them all takes hours and hours. Thus, if the project could be distributed (in a controlled manner) then that would save everyone the time and hassle of having to go through all of that on their own (like I did).

We'll see how it goes once I get the disc finished (which is VERY close now).

 

I've answered this several times here.

The first is False advertising. They state on all the marketing and advertising materials you can search over 6 million POI's. This would indicate you could "FIND" these POI's!! And the fact is, as is, as we have proven in sevaral examples above, you can't.

The second is in the general warranty of the vehicle. The warranty states they will fix or replace any hardware or software manufacture defects on the vehicle. This is easily proven to be a huge manufacturer defect. Especially when you add the price tag into the equation. Imagine 12 jurors told a device with a cost of $2,100 does not perform a simple task as advertsided. Nuff said.

NY has VERY strict warrantly laws, especially with motor vehicles. They WILL FIX this problem, or refund my $2,100.

 

To make matters even worse, MINI USA has now lowered the price of the nav system to $2000 in the 2008 models (see the new online configurator that's now available for the 2008 models on miniusa.com). I'd at least like to have my $100 plus tax back.

 

Maybe they'll give you an Apple Store gift card.