p

Wonder no more! We weren’t even really aware that there was a driving community developing in Uganda until we caught this road report from an enthusiastic user over there on the road. Good for you, wazer! Don’t forget to tell your friends to help spread the word…

Have a newborn baby and need to name it with a ‘W’ after your dear uncle William? Why not call the little one Waze? Writing a love poem and need a word that rhymes with ‘hearts ablaze’? How about Waze? Or maybe, like active Mexican waze user, @Marco_Mor, you have an ‘A’, a ‘E’ and a ‘W’ and you want to seal the deal in your most recent game of Scrabble. Waze – and Marco’s brain – to the rescue! That’s the thing – you never know when waze will come in handy…

We’re happy to announce our ‘official’ launch in Italy today, though the community there has been growing strong and steady for quite a while under the tutelage of some very active users. Similar to our launch in France and Germany a few weeks ago, this launch will also feature a developed road grid, which we’ll merge with data that local users have already contributed on their own.

In order to turn the grid into a fully functioning map, Italian wazers will just need to validate road directions by driving on the roads themselves, and add road names via waze’s online map editor. When the whole community gets involved, as we expect many of the Italians to do – like they’ve been doing for a while now, the entire process is incredibly quick,  and within just a couple of weeks, the Italian maps will be fully navigable and super accurate.

We thank all you Italians for your hard work up to this point, and we look forward to seeing how your community develops now that the base maps will make waze even more valuable. Keep us up to date and let us know if there’s anything you need…happy wazing!

Blackberry users rejoice! Waze is headed your way sometime very soon. Stay tuned to the blog for the official announcement once we have everything in order… hopefully in the next week, or two…

Hey Y’all – just a quick head’s up that a new iPhone version dropped today.  Here’s what it includes:

• A  ‘report  abuse’  feature - the  community’s  growing  and  there’s  many interactions  taking  place.  As  can  be  expected,  there’s  always  some  people  who  take  advantage  of  the  system,  so  we’re  enabling  users  to  flag  inappropriate  users.  Above  a  certain  number  of  reports  by  different  users,  a  user  will  automatically  be  disabled  from  pinging.



• An  improved,  and  much  better‐looking  navigation  bar - allowing  bigger  texts  and  ETA.
• Auto-update your  Facebook  status  – just  like what  we  do  for  Twitter.  In  the  future,  we’ll  use  Facebook  Connect  for  many  cool  features  such  as  showing  your  friends  on  the  scoreboard,  etc. – so stay tuned to the blog for more information, as we have it…



• Adding  street  name  &  house  numbers  from  client – note that this  feature  is  available  in  Grid  countries  only,  and  will  be  developed  later  for  additional  purposes.
• Spread  the  word – We  need  as  many  wazers  as  we  can  on  board  and  we  need  your  help  to spread the word, so we’ve  added the ability to invite  your  Facebook  friends  (in  the  future  we’ll  enable  showing  your  friends  in  the  client)  to waze and  to  let  you  review  waze  on both the  Appstore  and  Chomp, a  great  new  app  for  user  reviews  of  iPhone  apps.

That’s about it this time around. Make sure you hop over to the Appstore and update waze so you’ll be running with the newest version next time you hit the road…

Snap! Just this week waze was crowned first place winner at our local Pitchslam – and that puts us in the running to go up against the big boys at Innovate! 2010, where other local winners will come together for the international competition to discover the world’s most promising start-up. Pretty darn cool, if you ask us. Visit the Innovate! 2010′s website to learn more about their quest to identify top media and communications start-ups from around the globe, and hold a good thought for us as we head to compete on the world stage in a few months…

As driving communities are developing all over the world, we wanna know who you people are! So, we’re asking those of you out there who are active wazers to post a profile onto the user’s blog, so we and other wazers around the globe can get a sense of who else is out there.

To participate, simply copy and paste the below questions into a new blog post on the user’s blog, fill in your answers, add a picture of yourself, and hit ‘publish’. Of course, all questions are optional, so only answer those you feel comfortable with…

• Your real name:
• Your username:
• Occupation:
• What phone you’re wazing with:
• Dreamphone:
• How’d you hear about waze?:
• Any good stories while using waze out on the road?:
• Favorite part about the app:
• Favorite app apart from waze:
• Personal motto and/or anything else you’d like to share?:

…And if you don’t already have posting capabilities for the users’ blog, go ahead and drop a quick line to alli@waze.com with your preferred username and password – we’ll set up an account for you ASAP. Looking forward to learning a little bit more about you all!

Popped over to CNN for a little news fix and whilst scanning the page,  came across a familiar face, circled in orange below.    Mighta just been part of a Verizon ad, but still, fun to see waze up and out there in the world!