Looking for a way to grow your waze group?  There are a lot of things you can do to pick up your numbers and get more and more people involved. Here are just a few ideas that crossed our mind to share with you…

Tell a friend. It may seem obvious at first, but have you done it already? Tell those closest to you about how much you enjoy wazing and about your group in specific – and invite them to join in on the conversation.

Tell a Facebook friend. Your Facebook circle probably includes some of the people in the above category, but then a whole lot more beyond that. Do a quick little post to make them aware of your group and let them know, in specific, how you think it can benefit them. Oh, and remember to click the ’share’ button on the bottom left hand side of your page!

Tell a reporter. Know a journalist who’s looking for a good story? Tell them about the new kind of crowdsourced, social GPS that we’re working on over here at waze. And if you wanna be super proactive (nothing quite like seeing your name in print, cited as a group creator!), find out who the relevant reporters are at your local paper and go for the gold!

Tell a stranger.  When all else fails, Craigslist. Recruit the huddled masses by putting a post up on Craigslist.com. If you’re not familiar with craigslist, its a community bulletin board that’s organized by city and nearly every major city in the world has one.  Click here to find the Craigslist closest to you.

Two hours ago Steve Coast from OSM contacted us to let us know one of the OSM community members found what he thought was OSM data in our Chile database without attribution. Steve’s crew and Waze’s started investigating IMMEDIATELY across 3 continents and we had answers in 30 minutes.

What we found was a huge disappointment.; we indeed had OSM data which was not from a common base source and was clearly copied.

We have fantastic partners around the world who we partner with for local data. Unfortunately, our LATAM partner Location World had acquired data from an unreliable source who seems to have infringed on OSM, and Location World is now pursuing legal options against them.  While we sort this out, we have pulled all of the Chile data from Waze.  The data has been deleted from the database and should be gone from the Cartouche (our web editing interface) already.  It will take 24-48 hours for the deletion to propagate through the system and down to the clients (sorry Chilean Wazers).

To be on the safe side, we are pulling all the data from this source, in other countries as well: Peru, Uruguay and parts of Argentina, and it should be removed shortly.

The data will be back up again soon, after we have confirmed NO OTHER infringements are there. We are also embarking on a process to more closely review partner data around the world. It’s sad that this happens. We are huge fans of OSM and hope to collaborate with OSM through the new license transition.

So thanks to the OSM members; Ivan Sanchez in Spain and Julio Costa in Chile who identified the problem and we commit to deal with any other suspicion just as fast.  Thanks for Steve for knowing we would never do this willfully and letting us know this has happened in the past.

To map providers around the world, infringement is not only a crime but there is a large community out there monitoring your actions who will work together to find you.

And mostly to the OSM community, we are truly sorry.  We work with our partners to protect their data rights and will now be more vigilant on evaluating their sources.  We value your help and commit to protect your data rights as vigilantly as we protect our partner’s data, removing any infringement on your rights.

Noam Bardin
CEO Waze

This may very well be the largest caravan ever! We shall see ladies and gentlemen, we shall see. Mark your calendar for August 30th and start your engines! We are Black Rock City bound.
Join the Burning Man group on Waze and watch everyone converge on Black Rock City. Use Waze to carpool, ping each other, organize stops etc. We’re so stoked and want to give uber props to ActionGirl at BurningMan HQ for getting Burners to group it up on Waze!

Jack Rabbit Speaks just sent out their newsletter last night and they already have over 266 members of their group w/more joining every few minutes!

Follow the fun with the LIVE Burning Man group widget on the Burning Man site!

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Overall, we just crossed 3000 groups! Ding, ding, ding from Rome to Kuala Lampur to DFW and Atlanta. Waze on!

Feel free to send us stories about your group! We want to know what your group is up to and how its shaping up! In the meantime, see you on the Playa!

Already you can see a few early birds making their way to BRC!

All sorts of press coming out about waze in Italy in recent weeks, but one of the ones that we like best is a feature on Riccardo Bigi’s website. He’s one of our most active users in Italy and decided to take to his blog to tell the (Italian speaking) world what he loves about waze. Thanks, Rikki! The rest of you are welcome to do the same – just let us know if you need any graphics and we’re happy to send some screenshots/logos over…

Another nice coup in Italy was being featured on Nokia’s Play Italy portal. Lots of new users came in from that feature and we hope that you guys over there noticed the bump of new wazers around you!

By the way, we’re starting to think about cooking up something special for you Italians, so stay tuned to the blog for more details as we have them. Ciao for now…

Dear Android, BlackBerry, WinMo and Symbian Users,

We know some of you guys out there are frustrated that not all new features are available across your platforms, so we wanted to give you a bit of an understanding for the reasons behind that. As you know,  each device and OS type has its own characteristics and interfaces, both UI (different screen sizes and display types) and code based (OS specific interfaces, native device interface) which require extensive modifications to the code as well as thorough testing. We prefer to test it extensively on one platform (which is the easiest to develop for since there is more or less one OS type and one device type) before shifting to other platforms, and that’s why you’re seeing new releases with features geared mainly towards the iPhone.

Please don’t think that we’ve forgotten about you guys on other platforms, because we absolutely haven’t. Our users and their happiness are at the center of all that we do over here (really!), so we just ask for a little bit of patience with us. So you know, we do have an internal timeline outlining the dates by which we hope to integrate all new features across all supported platforms, but we don’t feel so comfortable to publish it. Mainly because we’re a start-up with a lean staff and unexpected things and delays are bound to come up in one way or another, and we just don’t want to disappoint you! But rest assured that we’re on the case, guys, and know that we’ll be announcing these milestones as soon as we can…

Many thanks for your understanding,

All of us at waze

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…

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!