Waze Announces Global Availability of Its Services

Waze, Inc., the free provider of driver-generated maps and real-time road information, announced today that its platform was available for community crowd-sourcing of maps all around the world. According to the company, drivers from over 20 countries worldwide (including Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Singapore, Thailand, Kazakhstan, and Trinidad Tobago) already started to use waze for building local maps. The application can be used anywhere around the world for generating real-time maps, all enabled through walking around with waze installed on the handset.

Given the fact that waze uses a community-based approach, the maps it delivers are built on driver-generated data. It runs on a smartphone and sends GPS points automatically as the user drives. The data is then exploited for the building and updating of road grid, road changes, and more. While the data is collected in a passive manner, drivers are also able to join the map editing process online on the company's website. The waze application has been launched in Israel and in the United States, and the high demand it has seen in these countries determined the company to make it available all around the world.

“Even without specific country support, we were amazed to see wazers on our live map in clusters all over the world self organizing,” said Noam Bardin, CEO of waze. “We are committed to fostering this community of users and supporting them with the new infrastructure launched today. I would like to thank these motivated wazers from all over the world for helping us bring better maps, free navigation and an improved daily commute to their regions.”

The waze technology enables drivers to build maps from scratch, yet the process is fast. As soon as a map is created, users will enjoy free turn-by-turn navigation through the application, not to mention real-time traffic updates and road reports. According to the company, the waze app has been downloaded by more than 200,000 users in Israel, and has proved to be the fastest growing navigation application in that market. The application is now available for Android, iPhone, Symbian and Windows Mobile users, and the company is looking for partnering with commercial map owners around the world for the crowd-sourced mapping initiative.

“Traditional map making technologies are labor intensive thus expensive,” said Mark Fitzgerald of Strategy Analytics. “Real-time maps and crowdsourced data can provide both the functionality and the free-to-consumer cost structure to serve as the map for the mobile generation, just as Wikipedia serves as the Encyclopedia for the Internet generation.”