In our last post we told you about how we cooperated with the Burning Man folks to help their festival participants navigate to base camp, Black Rock City, using waze. Well, today when we woke up, we saw the caravan begin, and what a thrill it was to see! We hope you burners (and now wazers, too) had a bunch of fun out there on the road using waze to get to the Playa (don’t forget to use us on the way back!) and we wish you a truly unforgettable experience with The Man, and with eachother…:)

One minute you’re ‘peaceful’, but then you might be ‘hungry’, or get ‘bored’, or start ‘wondering’…we know how it goes…we ‘wonder’ a lot on the road, too…but back to the point: one of the funnest parts about wazing is how often you can change your mood to reflect how you’re feeling at any given moment out there on the road. We love driving around our city and seeing the different spectrum emotions wazing along side of us, don’t you? Just lately, though, we thought that it might be about time to implement a few new options, and who better to turn to for new moods than all of you out there for some help?

Take a second and leave a few suggestions in the comments section below listing the moods that you’d like to see on waze and some time real soon we’ll do a poll and let you guys pick the top 2 or 3 to implement into an upcoming version. No, ‘drunk’ probably won’t fly, you lushes, but feel free to use your creativity and humor to come up with a few good options that you think others will want to get on board with…

A lot of us around the office are big Apple lovers, but today we admit that our love just got a little deeper following a ‘Staff Favorites’ feature on the Appstore! I guess we’re kinda cheap like that, but nevertheless, we wanted to share the fantastic news with you guys…

We’ve found that waze’s growth, and subsequent bulking up of the driving communities in your areas, all boils down to word-of-mouth and personal recommendations, so this relatively ‘personal’ recommendation means a whole lot to us. You can have a big effect, too. Next time you see a friend with a supported smartphone, let then know how much you enjoy wazing and encourage them to download waze and try us out. Like we’ve always said, the more people who use waze, the better it gets – and it’s true!

Live in the San Francisco bay area, love ice cream, and love waze? Well, you’re in luck! Waze is partnering up this summer with Treatbot - everyone’s favorite ice cream/karaoke truck – to offer you a sweet sweet deal: Simply show  waze installed on your phone to the good folks over at Treatbot and get a free farm fresh, local ice cream cone! (just one per user this summer, please.)

Everyday Treatbot travels to a different place in the Bay, so keep your eyes on Twitter (@treatbot) if they’ll be near you sometime soon… Enjoy!

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 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!

Huzzah! We’ve gotten a nice amount of traction from the new version and made quite a leap up in the Appstore -we’re now second under Navigation. Hope this means you’ll notice a lotta new wazers wazing in your area. If you see ones that are pingable (indicated by a tiny green chat icon), say hi and welcome them into your local driving community. As you might have already seen, waze is a whole lot more fun the more you interact with others…

Robert Scoble, a good friend of waze, recently came to Israel and met up with many of the cool startups at the forefront of what’s to come in the world of tech. He spent a little while with Di-Ann and Samuel, cruising the streets of Tel Aviv and checking out waze in action, and below is the result of their drive together. You can check out Scoble’s other great interviews with global business innovators here.

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!