Waze joins Google

Map Editors Community General Topics
1

Dear Wazers,
I am excited to announce today that we have accepted an offer to join Google. I’d like to share some information about what this means for Waze.

Larry Page, Brian McClendon and the Google Maps teams have been following our progress closely and are excited about what we’ve accomplished. They share our vision of a global mapping service, updated in real time by local communities, and wish to help us accelerate. We are excited about the prospect of working with the Google Maps team to enhance our search capabilities and to join them in their ongoing efforts to build the best map of the world.

Nothing practical will change here at Waze. Waze will maintain our community, brand, service and organization – the community hierarchy, responsibilities and processes will not change. The same Waze people will continue to collaborate with you, and we will continue to innovate our product and services, making them more social, functional and helpful for everyday drivers. Our employees, managers, founders and I are all committed to our vision for many years to come.

Why not stay completely independent? We asked ourselves: “Will Waze still be a fun project to participate in, and a fun place to work at, as a stand-alone public company?” Choosing the path of an IPO often shifts attention to bankers, lawyers and the happiness of Wall Street, and we decided we’d rather spend our time with you, the Waze community. Google is committed to help us achieve our common goal and provide us with the independence and resources we need to succeed. We evaluated many options and believe Google is the best partner for Waze, our map editors, area managers, champs and nearly 50 million Wazers globally.

Together, we can accelerate our mission to outsmart traffic. We will continue to make a real impact on drivers globally, helping them save time and money while making everyone’s daily commute a bit more efficient and fun.

So, it’s back to work for us with some great new colleagues and resources to enhance our project. Thank you for your participation in shaping Waze to what it is today, and we look forward to continuing to build out Waze together with you.

See you on the road,

The Waze Team

2

Good news. This can be a huge step for us all!

3

Here’s the Google Blog write-up from Brian: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/google-maps-and-waze-outsmarting.html

I’m glad the community will be sticking together as-is for the time-being. I’m really interested in finding out what “working with Google maps team” as it relates to Waze really means.

A hearty congratulations to the Waze leadership for getting your baby Wazer to this point. Your investors must be pretty pleased. :mrgreen:

4

Congratulations to all Waze employees and management from all of us here, in the oldest Wazer community of them all, here in Israel.
It is very pleasing to see such innovation rising from a small Israeli community project to become a worldwide recognizable success.

We hope you will keep the Waze community spirit living inside Google, and keep improving Waze for us all.

5

My Congratulation to Noam and Waze Team for that positive conclusion.

I hope we will be in the position to continue to work with your Team as we did till now.

I hope future Management decisions will alway be in Line with the “Waze Freedom Spirit”

6

Congratulations guys!

7

Glad to hear that it is Google and not facebook! Congrats :slight_smile:

How will waze and google merge their maps? Will we still have to edit?

This will waze to grow even faster! Congratulations again

8

Since Waze has sold out to Google, I will not be a Wazer anymore. All it will bring is more targeted ad placement and spying. Too bad because I was actually enjoying the app.

9

That could have gone much worse . . .

10

Congrats to the Waze founders and Waze Team!
Already looking forward for more news about how this will effect the maps and editing needs…
Very curious on what this will mean for the search function…
Very curious about a lot of things!

But i guess it’s time to celebrate for you, first!
Enjoy!

11

Congrats from Israel !

12

Now we finally know.

Good luck going forward and thanks for everything up to now.

I think this will be good for Waze and the community. Server infrastructure will no longer be a significant issue. I can see some ways to use the existing Google Map and the existing Waze Map Editors to make a combined product that will be better than either could be in isolation.

Mazel Tov!

13

Congratulations!

Waze has been innovative in many ways and has clearly become the leader in social mapping. I’m glad that you’ve all been rewarded for all your hard work and vision.

:smiley: :smiley: :smiley: :smiley: :smiley: :smiley: :smiley: :smiley: :smiley: :smiley:

Joining the Google community will only help Waze in the long term and I look forward to seeing how this evolves.

14

I don’t know if it is a good news.
The future will tell…

15

Very cool. I’m excited to see where it goes from here.

16

Congratulations… it looks like a dream come true for a startup…

By the way… may we use now the help of google maps to edit :lol: :lol: :lol:

17

Thanks guys. We’re very excited about this.
I’m sure you have many questions but in general things will only improve. We are the same team with the same goals and same “waze freedom spirit”. Being part of Google will give us access to new resources and allow us to accelerate things.
We will keep meeting you face to face in our meetups and communicate with you through the various channels as usual.

Ehud

18

Congratulation to the Waze team, this has been a great start-up story.

Don’t know what the future will bring, but I really feel like Sheldon Cooper by now ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCRTnzRiNmE )

Would you please let us know very soon what is the destiny of the maps we’ve been creating in the past 3 years? What does Google want to do with them? What will they do with two maps and two map editors?

Till that moment I’m not going to edit anything else, just to be sure I’m not wasting time.

19

Hi guys!
These are very exciting news indeed!
We’ll do our best to address all your questions here.

Basically, as Noam mentioned - nothing really changes in our workflow and in our work together.

Waze maps and Googles maps stay separated and it is not allowed to use google maps data to edit Waze maps.
However - there is going to be a significant focus on the enhancement of the map editor and new tools will be available to us - yes, that includes google’s aerials and street view !

20

Really exiciting. I used Google Map and Waze for a while and love them all. Looking forward to bringing us new features, accruate and stable map.

I used to update and correct waze’s map and compare with Google map. I also report to Google once I found map issue.

By the way, does it mean there is no more copyright issue to use Google map on Waze?