Something sorta neat to report – waze is now featured on the official website of the Ecuadorian police force! How did it happen? Well, once the police saw how useful the waze traffic information was, they decided to integrate our info with their site to provide a service to the public and their page’s visitors. Check out the site and you can see all of waze’s live, local traffic events scrolling down the page. Nice one, eh?

Want your Facebook profile picture to look like the one above? To add the waze badge on the bottom right hand side of your photo, all you have to do is visit this link and log in with your Facebook log in details – it’s super simple. The blue hair, however, you’ll have to do yourself…

Di-Ann Eisnor, waze’s Community Geographer, is participating in the 2010 Geo-Loco Conference today on a panel entitled ‘The Futures of Location Based Services’ where she and her fellow thought leaders will reflect on emerging Geo-Loco developments and share their views. If you’ll be at the show, make sure to say hi to Di-Ann. You can also catch her weekly Podcast, This Week in Maps, where she and co-host, Steve Coast, riff away on all things map-related. This week’s cast will feature her fellow panelists from Geo-Loco – worthwhile to take a listen if you’re a map lover like her…

You heard it here first! Waze is now supported in Danish and Hungarian which brings us to a total of 13 languages that we support (text only). At this point we have 10 different audio options and hope to add even more in the future. Most of the languages were translated by you guys out there in the international driving community and we offer you big thanks. If your language isn’t currently supported but you’d like it to be, visit the wiki to make your contribution and we’ll see what we can do!

It was a strong fight right up to the end, but of course, there can be only one…

This time around, the winner is  GERMANY!!!

A big congratulations to you guys and lots of respect for all of your hard work. Winners are being notified via email and will be announced via Twitter once we hear back from them. We hope you  had a good time competing in the waze worldcup, and we hope that the three winners have an even better time playing with their new iPads! Stay tuned to the waze blog for future chances to win!

Here are the top 11  players (for this final round) for each country. You all gave an amazing fight for your country!!!. As promised after last game,  in response to requests received by many of you after previous contests, we changed the overall mechanics of winning the competition,  to a raffle system, whereby each participant in the overall winning country had a chance of winning that was proportional to the number of road goodies they ate throughout the entire competition. So the winners are not necessarily listed in the below, very impressive group of players!

But Wait….

Since the contest was soooo tight; we decided to add A FOURTH WINNER  – One to be raffled from USA, FRANCE or  ITALY. The user will be picked using the same raffle logic.

Winners are notified by email. We’ll announce names as soon as we hear back from them.

As always, we want your feedback on how to make the game better, or any ideas for future games. Stay tuned.
More to come!

The first Waze Worldcup Game ended!
We’re double checking the results. Stay tuned results coming up later today!

Thank you for wazing!

Waze just passed our 1st million driver mark and want to give a great big thank you to the most generous, connected drivers on the planet. This is an exciting milestone for us and we hope you can feel it growing. We now no longer feel like we’re alone on the road. We’re starting to see more and more wazers every time we get into the car.

This has been an amazing week, with our new release, becoming #1 on the AppStore and now this. We’re just elated.

And it’s all thanks to this amazing community!

As you know, we just released a fun new version that allows you to see pictures of other wazers on the map, to see when your Facebook friends are wazing nearby and that lets you respond to Twitter-originated road reports using your Twitter account. Thing is, to take advantage of these new functionalities, you have to take a moment to connect your Facebook and Twitter accounts to waze. Setting up the connection is super easy. Follow these steps below, after which, you’ll be prompted to input your FB log in details on an additional screen. On the middle screen below, you’ll see where you can input your Twitter log in details, too…

We’d be happy to hear what you think about our new social media integrations – or anything else for that matter, so if you have something to say, feel free to drop us a line: alpha@waze.com

As Yael informed you guys, we were #1 on the Appstore yesterday and that’s quite a leap from where we were a few days ago. In short, the new version (the one with all the social media bells and whistles) has gotten a lot of attention and, as a result, we’ve seen a real nice rise in the US usership. Just take a look at the map above as the west coast was waking up…this is the kinda picture that we like to see!