Google set to acquire Waze for $1.3B
globes.co.il
globes.co.il
No GPS/maps system seems to offer the option for FasTrak or carpool lane.
No GPS/maps system offers a way to tell a driver in a carpool lane if they have to change several lanes to the right to merge onto another freeway, or if there is a new carpool lane opening up to your left that takes you directly onto the next freeway you way to get on.
This is what happens when you have an oligopoly (Garmin, Google/Waze, Apple) and everyone's product, design and sales people are in the Valley or Tel Aviv and not more driver-centric cities with much more traffic and orders of magnitude more route options like Los Angeles.
As an aside, yesterday I was traveling upstate NY and to get off from I87 to some local road, Google Maps navigated me to a "Tandem Area", which was also marked that way by a sign and was indeed the right choice. Of course, I'd never turn myself from a highway to a Tandem Area ;)
So it seems like they have a lot of small detail knowledge.
Dialects are interesting. In my native Pittsburgh, I always said 'Route 28' or maybe '79,' but now that I'm in LA, I always say 'take the 405 to the 10.'
I'd thought a FB acquisition would have been very important for FB -- it would have given them user-provided location info down to the foot for 50M people, which seems to me right up FB's alley (Where are you? Where are your friends? Where are you going? Where are they going?).
For Google, this will obviously cement their domination in the mapping space. As it is, they're so vastly far ahead than others (I think I heard from a friend who works there that they have 10,000+ people on the Maps team worldwide?)
Either way, Waze is awesome and despite the cynicism around what the big guys sometimes do, I can only imagine this making the app better and better.
From Google Q1 2013 earnings report: "Headcount – On a worldwide basis, we employed 53,891 full-time employees (38,739 in Google and 9,982 in Motorola Mobile and 5,170 in Motorola Home) as of March 31, 2013"
http://investor.google.com/earnings/2013/Q1_google_earnings....
[1] http://betanews.com/2013/04/30/waze-seeks-beta-testers-for-w...
This is a competitor to google's maps, the only thing they'd do is shut it down (or at least not make anymore updates, ah-la sparrow) and not integrate the ideas into Gmaps.
From the founders standpoint this makes total sense, though, it's obvious this was the end game because they had no money-making business model.
Map was never free data - I think they started with OSM, but later switched to a proprietary data source (and of course, they are crowdsourcing more data and updates from users)
Nokia bought Navteq for $6B. Our users create map data for free.
If they do acquire it, it will because they see a use for Waze talent and tech.
I do not believe (anymore) that google could acquire Waze and leave it as a standalone product. Which would mean lots of compromises in terms of community interaction because google has different approach to this than Waze does.
Even more - waze approach to handling UGC in terms of map editing is somewhat not perfect, but with google involvement it could be discarded (not fixed), since it's not trivial to come up with better way.
Google, i believe, is more interested in traffic data than in community map editing, but latter one gives Waze lots of its appeal.
The deal with Google supposedly has a clause that for the next 3 years, Waze development will stay in Israel.
Google translation: http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&n...
Google is significantly less under the thumb of the Israeli government than any Israeli company is. If push came to shove Google could close their Tel Aviv operations rather than comply. They couldn't do the same with the US government and any Israeli company couldn't do the same with the Israeli government.
Two, when my data is in US, there is still some hope that now or in the future the 4th amendment will provide some privacy. Or some amount of protection. When that data is not here, there is even less protection. Especially countries with strong motivations or history of selling or sharing intelligence. If Waze was in Saudi Arabia, Dubai/UAE, Pakistan, etc. I would have made the same comment, if anything, there is probably more transparency in Israel than the other countries I mentioned.
That being said. I stand by my comment. Israel has done a great job commercializing some of their intel research into a thriving IT sector (i.e. Startup Nation) but that also makes me suspect there is strong ties between their IT sector and their intel community, hence my mistrust.
If you're a user of Waze now, if anything then the situation can improve for you. Now being a purely Israeli company Waze is surely more susceptible to Israel intelligence agencies tracking than as part of Google. Yes, it will likely become more susceptible to U.S. intelligence agencies now, but this is not what your comment was about.
However, Waze using a dynamic map is able to provide mapping for the West Bank as well. While Google opened up its navigation app a few months ago in Israel, it has not been opened for the West Bank (possibly because of map licensing restrictions that similarly prevented opening it for Israel for so long).