This new version consists mostly of bug fixes and clean ups, but for those of us who work hard to make it to the top weekly charts in our state there’s a cool new feature – Exclusive moods, available just to us! Exclusive moods are Gold, Silver and Bronze wazers that are open only to users that scored the highest on the weekly chart the previous week. If you were a high scorer, you’ll be driving around with this mood for an entire week.
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!
Yeehaw! This week, waze won the overall iPhone category at the 2009 Smaato Mobile Advertising Awards in San Francisco. With more than 250 global nominees, judges deliberated between a diverse range of content to get to their opinion of the most exciting mobile apps out there.
Check out our company in the winner’s circle:
• Overall iPhone category winner: Waze
• Overall Mobile web category winner: Flirtomatic
• Overall Apps category winner: Aloqa
• Microsoft Phone category winner: SPB TV
• Motorola Android category winner: Aloqa
Wazers out there wazing…it’s a beautiful thing. Only just a few months ago when we first launched, you’d be hard-pressed to find tons of people using waze in California’s Bay Area – and look at us now! Above are screenshots taken by a member of our team yesterday showing all the activity that was happening on the road. We’re really happy to see all of you out there – and with many with different moods, no less! Keep on keepin’ on, Wazers. You’re doing us proud. 
If you’re a fan of waze and want to help us reach more drivers out there on the road, take a moment and head over to Hollrr.com, a cool new site devoted to promoting products via word-of-mouth recommendations. Hollrr’s vision is to ‘liberate the world from advertising,’ and it’s a great way to tell others about stuff you’re into while also learning about new products from your friends. To get started, sign up and find your friends via your online address books or search. Once you’ve got everybody, Hollrr! Tell your friends about waze and ask them to check us out and Hollrr back! Note that you can sign in with your Facebook credentials on the top right of the page.
Another similar service, but more specific to the iPhone world, is Appsfire. Appsfire gives people a super easy way to share their favorite iPhone apps with their friends online. All you have to do is install and start the automated apps extractor, visit and bookmark your personal iPhone apps webpage then create a selection of favorite apps to share with your friends via your blog, e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, etc. If you’re interested in learning more about Appsfire, take a look at their demo video here.
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