Congratulations to the winner of the 4th iPad! A big thanks to all of you guys who participated and brought your friends on over to waze. And for those of you who didn’t win this time, make sure to stay tuned here to the blog. We’re cooking up something big for the end of January (with a great prize) that you won’t want to miss!

Over the past month the competition to bring friends onto waze has really picked up! Since it seems like everyone is getting the hang of
the competition, we’ve decided to give everybody a couple more chances at winning a shiny new ipad (one a week for the next four weeks)! We figure a lot of people probably got new smartphones this holiday season and this would make a perfect opportunity to show them the wonders of waze!

A friendly reminder as to how it works: We’re asking our users to bring their facebook friends onto waze, and as a thank you for doing so, the 25 users who bring the most new facebook friends onto waze each week will be put into a raffle – and one lucky person will win an iPad!

Again, In order to participate

1) Make sure you are using waze on your phone – You can get waze from your local appstore or from m.waze.com from your mobile – we support iPhone, Android, Blackberry (8900 and up), Symbian and windows mobile phones

2) Make sure you’ve connected waze to Facebook – You can do this by visiting ‘Profile’ under the ‘Settings’ section on waze (iPhone and Android), or from ‘My Dashboard’ on waze.com (other phones), after signing in with your log in information.

3)  Tell your friends to install waze, enter their Facebook details and drive a mile – In order to qualify, make sure that they drive at least one mile using waze, plus enable their Facebook Connect, too.

4) Recruit, recruit, recruit and stay on top of your numbers!! Use facebook, twitter, and all social events to let friends family coworkers and anyone else you know about waze. Once your friends enable their Facebook Connect, too, they’ll show up on the ‘friends’ tab of your scoreboard for you to keep a general count of how many new friends you have to your credit.

Note: As mentioned above, only friends that joined waze during that specific week will be eligible. Existing waze users that you befriend will not be counted. Remember the goal this time around is to grow the Waze userbase!

Any technical questions about how to enable Facebook Connect? As always, feel free to turn to us for help: support@waze.com or on twitter @waze. Good luck guys!

And now the fine print…

ELIGIBILITY:You must be a 18 years of age or older to enter the Waze Inc. (Hereby “Waze”) contest. CONTEST PERIOD: Waze contest begins at 09:00 EST on November 29, 2010 and ends on January 23, 2011 23:59 EST PRIZE RESTRICTIONS: Each winner is responsible for any applicable taxes. Prizes listed are subject to its general availability on the market. In the event of non-availability on the market, Waze will provide a similar or equal compensation. LIMITATION OF LIABILITY: By participating, participants agree to release, discharge and hold harmless Waze and its partners, affiliates, subsidiaries, agents and their employees, officers, directors, and representatives from any claims, losses, and damages arising out of their participation in this contest or any contest related activities and the acceptance and use, misuse, or possession of any prize awarded hereunder. Waze reserves the right under its sole discretion, to cancel, suspend or modify the terms of the 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. CONDITIONS: This contest is subject to federal, state, provincial, territorial and local laws and regulations. Certain restrictions may apply. Void where prohibited. Waze makes no warranty of any kind, express or implied, directly or indirectly, regarding the prize delivery and Waze is not responsible for prize delivery being late, lost, stolen, damaged, mutilated, incomplete, illegible, misdirected, or postage-due. Participants also agree (a) to be bound by these Official Rules; (b) that the decisions of the judges are final on all matters relating to the contest; and (c) In the event that the selected winner(s) of any prize are/is
ineligible or refuses the prize, the prize will be forfeited and Sponsor, in its sole discretion, may choose whether to award the prize
to another winner.GOVERNING LAW/DISPUTE RESOLUTION: This contest shall be governed by and interpreted under the laws of the State of California without regard to the conflict of laws doctrine of any jurisdiction; and any disputes, claims or causes of action shall be
resolved only in a state or federal court located in the County of Los Angeles, State of California.

There’s nothing that says ‘proud wazer’ like driving down the road with your waze flag flapping in the wind, and now, we’re giving away free waze flags to anyone who wants ‘em! All you have to do is visit waze on Facebook, like the wall posting related to waze flags, and leave a comment in the comments sections answering the question ‘What do you love most about waze?’ After you post your comment, we’ll follow up with you within 24-48 hours to get your mailing address, and that’s it – easy as pie. Please note that it’ll be about 10+ weeks until your flag arrives, so we ask for your patience, but once your flag arrives, we really hope you attach it to your window and drive with it in style!

As you guys already know, we’ve been giving away one iPad a week for the last 3 weeks and there’s one more week to go. Why not try to make it yours? All you have to do is:

* Make sure you’ve connected waze to Facebook – You can do this by visiting ‘Profile’ under the ‘Settings’ section on waze (iPhone and Android), or from ‘My Dashboard’ on waze.com (other phones), after signing in with your log in information.

* Tell your friends to install waze, enter their Facebook details and drive a mile - In order to qualify, make sure that they drive at least one mile using waze, plus enable their Facebook Connect, too. Note that friends must be BRAND NEW users, as of November 29, 2010. Pre-existing users who register to Facebook Connect won’t be part of your count.

* Recruit, recruit, recruit and stay on top of your numbers – Once your friends enable their Facebook Connect, too, they’ll show up on the ‘friends’ tab of your scoreboard for you to keep a general count of how many new friends you have to your credit. Make sure to take full advantage of your social media networks to get people on board!

This last round starts today and goes until next Sunday, December 26, so get going before your people leave for the holidays! The bar to be a contender isn’t very high actually, even if you only get 2 or 3 new friends to follow the above instructions, that puts you in the running. And as for this week’s winner, we’re happy to announce that the iPad is going to user

Congrats on your win, Sara, and wishing all of you luck in this last and final round…

Game changing deal has Santa giving directions to users of the game changing and revolutionary free waze app; deal also changes the game

Palo Alto, Calif. — December 17, 2010 — Waze, the world’s most popular social GPS application, today announced a revolutionary partnership with Saint Nicolas (DBA: Santa Claus), the world’s leading giver and deliverer of gifts. Now and throughout the holiday season, Santa’s jolly voice will be providing turn-by-turn directions to all wazers.  Learn more about this seasonal twist to the waze app including audio clips and screenshots by visiting the waze blog here: http://www.waze.com/blog/wazes-holiday-goodie-hunt-make-the-commute-home-for-the-holidays-fun/

Waze provides free GPS navigation and turn-by-turn directions, as well as the most up to date, realtime traffic information from its network of over 2 million users.

“We are truly excited about this revolutionary, gamechanging, watershed, landmark, bookmark partnership,” said Noam Bardin, waze’s chief executive. “To partner with Santa is an amazing, once in a lifetime experience, he is both literally and figuratively a living legend.”

Santa had a similarly jolly outlook on the partnership.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, who typically provides navigation assistance during the holiday season, has been moved to the back of the line. Early reports indicate that Mr. Red-Nosed Reindeer is no longer welcome in any reindeer games, and that his cohorts have resumed laughing at him and calling him names (like Pinocchio!).

But seriously, folks, get guided by Santa this holiday season—on your waze app, go to Settings > General > Prompts > English (Santa) to experience seasonal audio guidance as you drive to your destination over the holidays.  Waze is available as a free download for Android, iPhone, iPad, Symbian and select BlackBerry models.
To download waze:

iPhone: http://itunes.apple.com/app/id323229106?mt=8

or for everyone else please visit m.waze.com from your smartphone!

Gettin’ a little ridiculous over here with the sheer amount of awards we’ve been nominated for lately, but it sure makes us proud to see that people find value in what it is we’re doing. Just today we saw that Nokia’s Ovi store nominated us for one of the ‘Best Business and Productivity Apps‘ this year! Voting is open to the public, so if you’d like to make your voice heard on our behalf, we’d certainly appreciate it – just click here for your one time vote. Thanks!

It’s that time of year again, and while we all love the holidays, one thing we all can agree upon not loving is holiday traffic. Good thing you have waze, though – to make the trip home for the holidays that much more fun. And you’re in luck! This season we’re serving up some holiday-themed road goodies to give you a chance to collect extra points as you head to wherever you’re going.

The holiday goodie hunt includes little snowflakes worth 2 points, candy canes worth 10 points and the rarest of the rare – santa hats worth a whopping 100 points each! And for those in an exceptionally festive mood, take a moment to switch your navigation prompts over to Santa’s voice. To make the switch, visit Settings>General>Prompts and scroll down the list until you find the jolly old guy (Santa prompts are available in English and French only this time around).  Note that it may take a little while for the prompts to download, so make sure to keep the app open until the download is complete. Click below for an example of what you’re in for…

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Last but not least, we’d love to hear any stories you have while heading home using waze on the roads – feel free to share them in the comments section. Wishing you and yours a safe trip home and a very merry holiday season, from all of us at waze!

Like we talked about in this post, we’re giving away one iPad a week for four weeks to one of the top 25 users who bring new friends on to waze each week, and we’re happy to annouce this week’s winner – USAFDAD!

There’s two more weeks to go, starting today, and if you wanna put yourself in the running for one of the two last iPads that are up for grabs, all you have to do is reach out and invite your friends on over to waze. In order to be eligible, have your friends to sign up, connect via Facebook and drive at least one mile…and that’s all there is to it. You can get more details at the link above, and note that it doesn’t take dozens and dozens to get into the top 25 – even if you have a small handful, you might be eligible, so it doesn’t hurt to give it a shot – you have two more weeks to win!

Hey fellow Wazers -

2010 has been a wild ride at Waze.  Thanks to our amazing area managers, mappers and global users, we have grown to over 2.2 Million drivers!  We have expanded our service to over 100 countries, and rolled out support for the 5 major smart phone OS’es, which is bringing the power of the social web to the driving experience in a whole new way.

We believe strongly that, since traffic is a social phenomenon, the solution must be social as well.  We have built our service around crowdsourcing real time driving data and have seen the value of this data grow – for our users and every day commuters, as well as commercial data companies and advertisers.

So it is with great pride that we announce we have closed $25m of funding, in a round led by our existing investors, Blue Run Ventures, Magma and Vertex, together with new strategic investors, including Qualcomm Ventures.   We would like to thank our existing investors for their support and welcome our new investors, as we look forward to their help in making our service even better.

With this fresh funding we are hiring extensively and planning to grow our amazing team on all fronts. First, we will expand our US HQ in Silicon Valley in terms of people and relocate to a larger office – we have outgrown our space here a bit We are also looking for talented people to help scale our service and build new functionality. Mostly, we need to continue to build our platform for real-time location data, where we are competing with the largest tech companies in the world, and can now build the corresponding organization!

So what’s in store for 2011?  First of all – we have big plans to improve and grow our service.  Lots of great features, functionality and infrastructure upgrades (prepare for a blazing fast Cartouch…).  Second – this will be the year of opening up our platform – data, API’s, access (more to come soon)…  Third – We plan to take crowdsourcing further than it has ever gone before.  We want media companies to engage users as citizen journalists, and NBC2 is just the first step toward this. We want to enable local governments to encourage users to report about hazards on the road to help keep our roads safe.  We want major brands to provide wazer’s with incentives to visit their establishment, helping you find deals on the road…  We have lots of big plans for 2011, and now have the funding to achieve them.

So – things are just taking off.  The future is social–come join us for the ride!

Noam (@noamb11) and the Waze Team (@waze)