Self Management
Our communities in the Philippines & Romania now manages their own Area-Manager distribution.

Gas stations
The gas station feature was opened in Belarus – congratulations!
If you want to have the feature opened up in your country, then it's time to start editing the map.
If you add at least 70% of your country's gas stations – we will activate the feature there.

Know your Champs

This time we're talking to an Israeli Champ - orenfl

For anyone who doesn't know you, what's your real name?
Oren Flaschner What do you do in life?
Industrial Engineer for Global Semiconductor manufacturing company.

And what's your role in the Waze community?
Global Champ, Android expert, Israel country manager for several years and Israel community coordinator.

How long have you been Wazing?
I’m with Waze from very early days, around 2007, even before it was named Waze.
I began with a small screen Nokia 6230, running a Java applet version of Freemap which later on evolved into Waze. I can tell that ever since it moved to Symbian and then Android, my smartphone upgrades always were due to Waze demands and evolution.

When did you start editing the maps?
I started editing in 2007, first as a local manager for my village in the Galilee I live in, then became the northern-Israel area manager and then quite quickly one of the Israeli country managers
I've been a CM for more than 3 years now.

So since 2007 I'm sure you managed to find a favorite feature in Waze-
 like the wisdom behind the scenes, where I can get the server to re-route me in case of a better route than my current one. I’m working hard with the QA and development on clearing the bugs and adding important UI improvements as my wife is a UI specialist and a Waze user as well.

Any funny Waze stories?
Once in a while I’m in a traffic jam on my way to work which is usually quite clear. Whenever there is a very heavy one I’m quite skeptic about Waze's predictions and every time I fall into the trap and override Waze's recommendation, believing it’s wrong and spend too much time in the traffic jam...

What would you consider, is your biggest achievement in Waze?
I guess that several Waze features/improvements are following pressure made by senior Israeli users and me. Seeing it in a formal client release is the best recognition.

What would you like to see improved in the future?
Having new smartphones with high resolution yet relatively small screen, Waze is not yet designed for; I’m having hard time reading the tiny map with my not-so-old eyes…

What would you do if you didn't edit maps?
I would probably spend more time with the kids and wife, ride more MTB and answer more Android related questions in XDA and other forums.

Any final words of wisdom for our community?
Waze is a great community where everyone is contributing according to his/her ability. I’d like to congratulate Google for acquiring Waze and hope this community and the ability of its users to contribute either editing the maps or provide driving alerts and such will only get better!
Thanks Oren!


Community & Social
Congratulations to leocylau, the newest member of the 300,000 map edits club.
More congratulations to pjlasl, the newest member of the 400K club.
We also would like to congratulate gettingthere & doctorkb for joining the 500,000 map edits club.
Finally, a big congratulations to jondrush & milkyway35 who accumulated over 600,000 edits and are now members of the 600K club.

Well done to you all, and we'll see you in 2 weeks!