Waze ended 2012 with 34 million users and expects to double that by the end of this year

Waze, the Israeli company behind the community-based traffic and navigation smartphone app with the same name, today announced on its blog that it attracted a total of 34 million users in 2012.

Update: blog post suddenly went missing. RIP.

That is up from 28 million users at the end of October 2012, and up from 10 million users at the beginning of last year.

Clearly, growth is accelerating, at least when it comes to people downloading and using the free Waze Android and iOS apps.

In the infographic Waze put together to celebrate the new user base milestone, the company projects 70 million users by the end of 2013, slightly more than double the number of users it has today.

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The infographic also reads “Crowdsouring works, together” at the bottom, which made me LOL.

Pay very little attention to the rest of the ‘stats’ in the infographic, which are meant to suggest Waze is pretty much single-handedly saving the world – or something.

That said, the very nature of Waze’s service does mean that it saves users a lot of valuable time, and looking at the sheer user numbers I would say people appreciate that and tell their friends.

Waze itself says its goal is to save every user about 5 minutes per day.

Looking at the average day of a TNW staffer, that would feel like an eternity to all of us here.

More importantly though, the end of 2012 also saw Waze starting to crank up the money machine: the startup launched its own ad platform, allowing advertisers to insert “location-guided” ads that users can see on their maps and search results when they navigate to their destination.

Yes, and before we forget: Apple was rumored to be in talks to acquire Waze, but no one really knows for sure except for the people who were or weren’t at the table. Don’t you think we’ve stopped digging, though.

Image credit: Thinkstock