Some really nice shout-outs to close the year!

• First up, the comic above, by Greg Dean that we were kinda tickled by. Thanks for your support, Greg, we hope you munched all the santa hats you could manage
• Second, everyone’s favorite productivity blog, Lifehacker, chose us as best turn-by-turn nav app for iPhone *and* best turn-by-turn nav app for Android. :::Totally blushing:::
• And lastly, we’ve been Scobblized once again – Robert Scoble, who’s always been a great Waze champion, put us in his 10 ten of the year! Take a peek at who the other 9 are to make sure you’re on the board with the most exiting apps of the year…

That’s it for now – happy happy, joy joy to you and yours…

Well, we’re in the thick of Carmageddon out here in Los Angeles, and so far, it’s smooth sailing. People have heeded the city’s warnings to stay in their areas this weekend and, surprisingly, most Wazers out there on the road are reporting that the freeways are clearer than they’ve seen them in over a decade. While the expected chaos might not have fully materialized just yet, the good news is that Carmageddon has been a phenomenal opportunity for Waze and we’ve gotten some very exciting pick-ups in the press on both the local and national level, as a result.

Locally, our partnership with the Eyewitness News team over at ABC7 has helped spread the word far and wide about what Waze has to offer the LA driving community, and nationally, the stories have been too numerous to count, but you can check out the CNN video above for a taste of the coverage we’ve been receiving over the past few days.

Naturally, exposure like this leads to a nice bump in new users, and for those of you who’ve been around for a while, you know what that means – a waaaay better experience out there on the road, since the more people who use Waze, the better it gets. We think over the coming weeks as word continues to spread, US driving communities will notice much more local activity…more Wazers on the map, more road reports, improved routing…In fact, we’d love to hear from you – leave us a comment below if you begin to notice the difference…

We’re always impressed when a wazer takes getting the word out about waze into their own hands, and such is the case with user, Erik, aka ’scroggin-info.’ He went to the national Swiss radio channel, DRS3’s website a few days ago, wrote a bit about waze on their user suggestion page, and voila!, DRS3 will be covering us today for a half an hour. Pretty cool, huh? When this happened last time in The Netherlands we saw some really great new growth with tons of baby wazers out on the map. We hope the Swiss maps are full of baby wazers out there tonight, too. Many thanks for your help, Erik. Users like you make a big difference for us! Here is a link to the show.

Just last week, our VP Community Geographer, Di-Ann Eisnor, did a great, and lengthy!, interview with Tim over at Geek Free Radio. They covered tons of topics from privacy and safety issues all the way to what’s comin’ up for us over at waze if you wanna sneak peek. Click here to hear the full interview.

Just call us ‘Covergirl’

Nice little shout out from the folks over at Gizmodo Australia, who’ve listed us as one of their ‘Apps of the Week.’ Here’s what they had to say about us, below. We’ve never been called a ‘light-hearted navigation app’ before, but we like it! Hee hee

“Waze, the free, light-hearted turn-by-turn navigation app, just got its upgrade to 2.0, and it’s a more viable replacement for the Navigons and Telenavs of the world than ever. In addition to being generally snappier and shinier, Waze 2.0 adds a neat group feature for organising carpools and a system of rankings and achievements, you know, for making your commute fun. Wonderfully free.”

In today’s Technology section of the New York Times, our CEO, Noam Bardin, gives his response to AT&T’s annoucement that they will be discontinuing unlimited data plans.

In addition to being featured in the article’s photo (nice shoes, Noam!), there are also some choice quotes highlighting how this decision will effect app developers, like waze.

“What created this lively app world we are in was the iPhone on one hand, and unlimited data plans on the other,” says Noam. “If people start thinking about how big a file is, or how fast an application is refreshing, that will be a huge inhibitor.”

Click here to read the full article.

Robert Scoble’s recent piece for TechCrunch, “Location 2012: Death of Information Silos,” is an interesting read that namechecks waze a few times in it’s look forward into the future of LBS services. Take a moment and click here to read the full article.