Waze is a social mobile application that enables drivers to build and use real-time road intelligence. The service includes constantly-updated road maps, alerts on traffic and accidents, and data providing users with the fastest route to get to wherever they need to go.
Map and traffic updates are automatically collected and generated as users drive with waze activated, but drivers can also actively report and update other users with what's happening on the road including accident alerts, police traps, weather hazards, cheap gas offers and more. And the best part? Because the map and all of its content is driver-generated, waze is completely free for users.
The idea for waze originated years ago, when Ehud Shabtai, a software engineer with a degree in Philosophy and Computer Science from Tel Aviv University, was given a PDA with an external GPS device pre-installed with navigation software. Ehud's initial excitement quickly gave way to disappointment - the product didn't reflect the dynamic changes that characterize real conditions on the road.
An experienced open-source developer with deep experience of Web 2.0 applications, Ehud took matters into his own hands and started to build the first dynamic traffic platform which combined GPS, open-source software and a community of drivers. His goal? To accurately reflect the road system, state of traffic and all the information relevant to drivers at any given moment.
Roads are dynamic and change at every minute, yet today's maps and GPS devices fail to reflect this, leaving drivers in the dark as to what's really happening on the road at any given moment. Waze takes an innovative approach to address this problem, providing drivers with real-time road intelligence and the best possible route to their destination.
By simply driving around with the waze client installed on their smart phones, users share real-time information that translates into traffic conditions and road structure. Drivers using waze can also actively report to the community on traffic, accidents, police traps, blocked roads and more. This information is collected and immediately analyzed to provide waze drivers with the most optimal route to their destination, 24 hours a day.
Some of the waze community members with a passion for maps also take an active role in editing and updating the waze map, itself. Most of the editing work is done on the waze Web site, but some parts, such as the naming of streets, can be done through the application directly.
Just like other 2.0 services, the initial, building stage is usually led by early-adopters who align themselves with our vision. These people understand that a product such as waze takes time to fully develop and enjoy participating in this early stage, making themselves cornerstones of the waze community.
Please note that our building phase is likely to take a few more months before we get the product to a point where 'casual users' will be able to immediately benefit from the service.
Yes, waze began in Israel where an enthusiastic driving community formed quickly around the service. Today, there are close to 100,000 smartphone users in the State providing drivers with ETAs of above 90%. It will take a bit of time for our US operations to ramp up to this capacity, but 3 years into our Israeli operations, Wazers just can't get enough!
Since waze is a pure mobile 2.0 service, the first place we will roll out the service will be in the San Francisco Bay Area followed by Boston and Chicago. We hope to have national coverage of the US within the year.
In Israel, the map was built by waze community members from scratch, yet in the US, in order to accelerate the process, the waze community will validate and update a pre-existing map - the United States Census Bureau TIGER map. While it's a great start, we have found that at times the TIGER map has typographical errors and missing directionals that can result in poor or incorrect routing.
Driving with waze activated, combined with manual map edits on the Web, should improve the quality of the map and make it much more navigable within a short timeframe.
Yes. Map data is already available (on the client) and can be used for non-commercial purposes. Developers can contact us to receive access to our real-time APIs. In the future we plan on opening APIs in a broader respect. Stay tuned for more information!
Yes, waze is absolutely free. Since it's based on user contributions, it's only natural that waze will be free for those who build it. The navigable data market is a huge market and our current business model involves selling our data set (maps, traffic, etc.) to relevant third parties while keeping the service free for individual users.
Waze enables the use of the service in almost total anonymity. We do not require personal details - apart from an email address - for registering or for using the service. We do not collect phone numbers or any information other than what is voluntarily provided by the user.
Commuters usually have more than one route to their destination, and the eternal question when you get into their car is 'which route is the best for me right now?' Once you enter your home and work addresses, and drive 3-4 times along each of these routes, waze will collect information and learn your optional routes, answering the question each morning as to which route will be fastest.
Unlike Dash, waze is free and runs on any GPS-enabled smartphone. It doesn't require buying a dedicated device
Connectivity is required to allow waze to both receive and deliver real-time road information relating to your preferred route. Additionally, your connectivity allows waze to immediately re-route you as conditions on the road change.
We are starting out with Android and Windows Mobile phones and will soon expand to support to other phones. The phone needed for installing waze and using the service is a GSM phone with GPS that has one of the following operating systems:
A data plan to enable the sharing and consuming of the real time information during commuting. We recommend an unlimited data plan.
Waze has the technology to create dynamic maps from consumer driving relatively quickly. This is how we created the map in Israel, but when we planned on making our app available on the US market, we decided to use an existing map as a base, rather than start the map building from scratch, and considered various map providers including OSM and TIGER.
We are committed to keeping waze free for our end users who help build the system, yet we're a commercial company who's looking to generate revenue down the line. When looking at the OSM licensing terms, we felt that they might limit us from certain business models in the future, and, therefore, we decided to use TIGER maps. This may change in the future, however, and we are open to potential cooperation with OSM, and other, similar, services.