Waze is a company to watch. They are based in Israel and are launching their US service today at DEMO. I heard about Waze last week when I had drinks with some Israeli people (thanks for mentioning Tal).
Waze is the number one traffic resource in Israel, by providing real time information about traffic jams to your cell phone. This information is gathered from the community. Waze tracks the geo location of its users and aggregates that data to come up with road maps and provide real time traffic info to commuters.
Oh and that’s not all; Waze provides turn-by-turn navigation and is free of charge. So if you live in the US and go to work by car often, get Waze now.
How it works:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfqtcW9rmJ8[/youtube]
Waze is available as of now in the US (unfortunately not in Europe) for the iPhone, Android, Symbian and windows mobile phones. The latter two are released today in alpha.
Chicken and Egg
As many startups Waze has a typical catch 22 problem. It needs to get a critical mass to provide a great service and it needs a great service to get a critical mass, but in Israel they pulled it off (20% of all smartphones have it installed). For a service like this you don’t need to have the whole market for it to work. A small percentage could be enough to make accurate predictions.
I’m jealous at all US and Israeli users. I want Waze on my iPhone too!
More to come on DEMO startups today. Stay tuned!
Update: Markus asked some questions in the comments, I went over to Waze and put a camera in front of him:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi7IanfmftE[/youtube]
It is available in the Android Appmarket in Europe, been recording roads now for more then a week in the Netherlands. Great product and from what I can tell when driving around with waze, there are already more people using it in the Netherlands also. The only thing missing would be offline maps also, especially in Europe when moving countries is easily done and people are paying roaming costs to navigate around.
Hmm. looks like i am a “geo geek” and that it wont happen :-(
So probably Waze is already dead because Openstreetmap will win like Wikipedia did.
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/08/waze-make-your-own-maps-in-rea.html
http://twitter.com/jrishel/status/3286835212
Quote:
“One of the first questions that many geo geeks ask of Waze is what about whether they could use OpenStreetMap’s data. CEO Noam Bardin is wary of the OSMs licensing and would rather start from scratch. Waze definitely intends commercialize their maps and does not want to have any issues with that. He views the two projects as fundamentally different. He wants Waze to be a realtime mapping data source that includes road closures and traffic (whether or not OSM participants would agree that they aren’t realtime is another story). The choice to not use OSM data is not difficult in the US where TIGER data provides a great free resource for geo apps. However Waze intends to go to Europe, where each country has different rules governing their geodata (one of the reasons OSM began their). When Waze does go to Europe they will have to consider using OSM data and they hope that the licensing is compatible by then (or they may have to use a more costly service like Tele Atlas or NAVTEQ).”
Hopefully the Waze guys (and gals) also share their data with the Openstreetmap community.
Good point Markus, if I get the chance to ask the CEO today I’ll do so.
Markus, I asked their CEO, check it out here.
Go to Sao Paulo/Brazil, this will *the place to be for Wase: they are Many alternatives to go from one point to an other and everyone spend more than 1 hour in traffic jams everyday. With more than 6M cars and thousands of event per day (including broken cars, floods and fallen trees on streets) this is your market! ;)
does anyone know if it possible to use waze in israel using english language?
jcvangent: Happy to hear you’re enjoying waze. We’ve added offline support for maps. will be released within a week or so – It’s an issue everywhere outside of the US. We’re also working on a more friendly start for places with no base map…. soon too.