Archive for July, 2009



Win your choice of a myTouch 3G Android phone or iPhone 3Gs!

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

Help build the waze driving community in your area by participating in our new ‘waze across America’ contest – now for Android and iPhone!

How to participate:

  • Download waze (it’s free).
  • Send a waze road report to other users in your area.
  • Keep waze on until you arrive at your destination.
  • One out of the first 100 unique road reporters in your state wins!*

* – you must be registered with a valid email address to participate.

win a myTouch 3G or iPhone 3Gs phone completely free

Contest details


We’re giving away an Android myTouch 3G phone or iPhone 3Gs (winner’s choice) to one of the first 100 unique wazers who send in a road report in your state! Note that we’ll start with the first 10 states to get to 100 road reports by unique users, and may expand the contest afterwards, accordingly.


With one entry per user, if you’re one of the first 100 drivers to send a road report in your state, you’ll have a 1% chance to win! And even if you don’t win, we’ll send the top 5 waze road reporters (by frequency), in these first 10 states, a bag of goodies as a thank you for their contributions to the community.


What you can do to increase your chances of winning


To make sure your state reaches 100 road reports by unique users, contact your friends and acquaintances with iPhone or Android phones, directing them to this link to enter the contest.

You can also:

  • Write about the contest in your blog
  • Tweet to your followers
  • Link to this page via your Facebook status update
  • Stay tuned to @waze on Twitter for contest updates

By spreading the word, you’re actually increasing your own chances to win!


How to send a report on waze


Once you’ve downloaded the app, you’ll find the ‘Report’ button on the bottom right hand side of the main screen. Reporting is as simple as tapping this button, choosing the type of event you’d like to report on and pressing send.


How to get waze on your phone


If you’re an iPhone user, go ahead and download waze from the Appstore by searching for ‘waze’ or finding us under the ‘Navigation’ category. If you’re an Android user there are two ways you can install waze for your Android phone - either visit the Android Market and search for waze there, or open the barcode scanner on your phone and scan our QR code, below.

barcode1

Legal Notices

  • Contest period – the contest ends on December 31, 2009. Only road reports received prior to this date shall be eligible to participate.
  • You must be 18 years of age or older to enter this contest.
  • Winner is responsible for any activation fees and/or upgrade fees, and service fees, as well as reporting and paying any and all applicable taxes.
  • Prize listed is subject to its general availability on the market. In the event of non-availability on the market, waze will provide equal compensation.
  • Waze reserves the right under its sole discretion, to cancel, suspend or modify the terms of this contest, in whole or in part; and the right to disqualify any participant in the event of tempering, unauthorized intervention, fraud, technical failures or any other causes which in Waze sole opinion corrupt or effect the fairness, integrity, legality or proper conduct of the contest.

Getting the most out of waze

Sunday, July 19th, 2009

Between the feedback we’ve received on Twitter and the Android Market, we’re happy to see that people understand that the waze community is a work in progress. It’ll take a little time until there’s a critical mass of users in your area, but stick around! Once you’re part of an active driving community, you’ll see how much more the app will have to offer.

community5

For the app to provide its full value, a few things need to happen:

 

One – you gotta help us spread the word! The more people wazing in your area, the more useful the application will be. You’ll be able to communicate with other drivers when stuck in a traffic jam, you’ll get super-reliable traffic updates and a whole lot more…

 

Two – you gotta get out there and drive! The cool part about waze is that the more you drive, the better it gets. It’s smart like that. By just driving with the app open, you’re automatically helping to build the live maps (teaching the map what streets are one way, where the turns are, etc.) that the rest of the community will benefit from, too.

 

It’s really fun for us to see people get excited about waze and to encourage others to get involved to build the community in their areas. Check out some of the comments we’ve seen on the Android Market so far:

  • “Download if you’re in Seattle, this is only gonna be useful if we all use it; needs a bigger community. Fun, tho.”
  •  “Looks great and it has a whole lot of potential.”
  •  “Missing part of road, but there is where we the users come in 2 make it better by adding and editing street.”

Waze hits the podcast waves

Sunday, July 19th, 2009

Last week, our CEO, Noam, hit the air in his very first podcast on behalf of waze. What we thought would be a brief chat turned into an in-depth conversation about how waze started, all the app has to offer, our plans for the future – and Noam even answered questions from people who were following android-guys-logoalong on, live, via phone and Twitter.


Click
here to take a listen. Wait a couple of seconds and the podcast will start automatically.

Stylin’ with waze

Sunday, July 19th, 2009

We sent a few promotional items to some extra-special users that really helped us out during our early Android alpha phase as a thank you and one user was so pleased with his shirt that he put a pic up on twitter of him rocking his new waze T. We wanted to share it because it made us smile – plus it looks like it’s a pretty good fit.

 

waze-tshirt

Map editors, improvements and area managers

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

The waze map is constantly improving and really starting to shape up – thanks to more and more people who are getting involved and helping us make the maps of their hometowns better.

cartouche

We invite all map lovers to check out our new and improved map editor (cartouche), that now has a few new features that help you map better:
  1. State and city names pre-filled when creating a new street
  2. connect and disconnect roads to junctions with one click
  3. layer transparency (to view more or less of the roads / gps points / satellite imagery / any layer you choose)
  4. Editing a few segments at once
  5. much more

This is also a good chance to give a big kudos to some of our top notch map editors: Fitch, hodgie2005, sstair, ryman1, seppesai, dougm, kasrhp and Meister! Keep up the good work!

We are now starting to appoint area managers; an area manager has more privileges and permissions in his specific area of expertise (for example, your city or neighborhood).


If you’d like to learn more about map editing or becoming an area manager in your city, drop us a line at alpha@waze.com

Your phone could be wazing soon

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

We’ve been getting a lot of questions about support for more phones, so we’ve figured  to share our roadmap for the near future here on our blog and unwind some worried minds.

Waze is currently supported on Android devices (G1, MyTouch / G2) and will support future Android devices as well.

waze on WinMo coming soon!

Here are the next versions we are currently planning:
  1. Windows Mobile – around the end of August we will support touch screen devices such as the Touch Pro and Pro2 (Fortress) , Diamond2 and the Omnia. A qwerty version for phones such as the Snap, Jack and others will follow shortly after.
  2. iPhone – the waze version for iPhone will be available on the app store by late August / early September, and supported on both 3G and 3Gs devices
  3. Nokie / Symbian – we will support both touch (5800 / N97) and non-touch (E71) phones by early Septemeber.
  4. BlackBerry – we are planning support for BlackBerry devices (touch and keyboard), but those are still in early stages of development.
You can always sign up for our next alpha to receive an email as soon as these version are available: http://alpha.waze.com/alpha_register/

Keep following our blog for updates on new devices and features!

Waze ‘voice-off’ contest coming soon…

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009

Maybe you’ve taken the time to explore waze and you’ve noticed that although we provide turn-by-turn directions to most destinations in the US, we haven’t currently enabled the capability to provide these directions via vocal prompts. We’re working to include this in the coming version, but in the meantime, we started thinking about what voices we’ll want to use, once the time comes. voice-contest-gps

 

Of course, like you, probably, we’re not big fans of the standard GPS voices you commonly hear, and decided that we’d want to do something a little different. And then it dawned on us: we realized that since the best parts of waze are 100% user-generated, we should roll with that idea and turn to our users, their friends and the wider community to find the voice of waze.

 

So now we’re busy putting together a voice competition and will be starting to spread the word about it over the coming weeks. Things are just in the works right now, but in a little while we’ll be ready to tell you more. Stay tuned to the blog here for more information as we have it…

Community Building in San Francisco

Sunday, July 5th, 2009

There’s always an exciting moment when things start to come together, and last week, we had a lot of those. Seeing the first few people reach out to each other in the same driving community got us all tickled. We hope the driving communities in your area start to grow quickly so you can experience the same thing, too!community3

Unlikey waze mention on the Web

Sunday, July 5th, 2009

proposal

Waze had a nice review on an external blog and when we were checking to see how much traffic it netted us, we were surprised to see that the most traffic of the day came from an unlikely source: makeuseof.com’s list of the top 5 geeky ways to ask someone to marry you on the Internet. Coming in at number one was the idea of creating a GPS mission for your beloved to find the ring, citing waze as one of the many resources that can help you do this. Not exactly what we had in mind when creating our app, but happy to see people spreading the word about waze!

 

Good vibes on the Android Market for waze

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

Positive reviews about waze are already coming in to the Android Market and we couldn’t be more excited! Here are a few of our favorites:

 

·         “Three thumbs up!”

·         “This is so awesome I wish more people from my area would download this.”

·         “Really cool social app. Lots of potential to become a revolutionary navigation app.”

 

We found a great site called Cyrket to keep on top of the reviews. You can check it out here.