A couple of months ago we announced our international partnership program. Through these partnerships, waze receives base maps that are quickly transformed by local wazer communities into fully navigable live maps. Our local partner benefits from a constant stream of updates to their base maps.  Our first partnership was formed with leading  South American map maker – Location World. We are very happy to have officially launched, together with them, a fully localized service in Ecuador.

Here’s a look at the city of Quito this morning.  Users seem happy. Quito is known for being constantly jammed.  So far we’ve launched on iPhone, Android and Nokia, but many Ecuadorians are still waiting for the Blackberry version, since nearly 70% of Ecuador smartphones are BlackBerry.  The Black Berry is in Beta and will be released within a week or two so we should expect to see many more wazers cruising in Ecuador very soon.

(There will be a slight delay until we can make Blackberry available to users of other places in the world as it requires building a specific re-build of tiles specifically for BB)

Ecuadorian wazers, let us know what you think!