Google To Buy Waze For $1.3 Billion 153
An anonymous reader writes "Google and Israeli start-up Waze have agreed in principle on a deal in which the search engine giant will buy the road traffic information sharing application for $1.3 billion. Waze, which claims more than 40 million users, describes itself as an app bringing together 'the world's largest community of drivers who work together to fight traffic, and save time and gas money on their daily commute.' There have been previous reports that first Apple and then Facebook wanted to acquire the Israeli start-up."
Re:Geotarding? (Score:5, Insightful)
> This is a huge blow for Apple
I doubt it. I've said (when Scott Forstall stepped down) that Apple realised that it's not in the data industry. Sure, they can do a bit in-house, but they just don't have the resources to cross the moat that Google has with its infrastructure, code, and expertise.
Apple does hardware, interfaces, and marketing very well. It leverages other company's products (its kernal, the BSD userland, GCC / LLVM, and Google's online stuff) when it lacks any real competitive advantage. Google is a harder pill to swallow (since they can't just fork it and modify things to suit their needs), but it's a battle they've chosen not to have.
Android and Glasses are what they should be focus on beating, and they won't beat them if they lumber their own devices with half-assed clones of the things Google does best.
Re:Geotarding? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, they've got to get their maps data from somewhere, which means they're in the data industry now. The fact that Apple were bidding for Waze suggests they're stuck with it unless they decide to partner up with someone like Google again.
Re:Geotarding? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, they've got to get their maps data from somewhere, which means they're in the data industry now. The fact that Apple were bidding for Waze suggests they're stuck with it unless they decide to partner up with someone like Google again.
Apple got their data from a number of different sources originally. One of these was TomTom which might explain the decent data quality in the UK. They were also reported to have been getting traffic data from Waze in some form already. Don't forget that Waze aren't a mapping company, they are a traffic company.
Apple aren't going to partner with Google because Google would have them over a barrel with respect to mapping on iOS. All they can do is iterate on the data that they've got, they were employing people to manage this in the different regions a while back, and look for other complimentary data sources. One problem with getting a new data source is merging it into the existing data and managing conflicts. I worked on GIS systems back in the early '90s and it wasn't trivial then with the small amount of data available. I can only imagine that its got worse as the data set sizes have increased.
Re:Pop3 and Thunderbird (Score:4, Insightful)
I already did, pop3, I found that my ISP provides an excellent email. I was quite surprised how much easier Thunderbird is, and pop3 may be old, but it doesn't leave your email on the cloud.
Secure the link with TLS, I asked the ISP if their SMTP connections are force secure, he assure me it is.
My government may not protect my privacy, my British politicians may not have my interests at heart, I may be classed as possible terrorist to be watched, but there is a way forward here.
And it even works better than before!
Your email still passes through the ISPs server so the meta-data about who you received mail from and when, and who you sent mail to and when, is still recorded in their logs. If GCHQ see something they count as suspicious then they can apply to the Home Secretary or Justice Secretary to allow interception of your email and its done.
If the PRISM stuff is to believed then it doesn't matter where your email is delivered it just has to pass a listening point and they have it. So well done for changing your mail setup but I don't think it'll make much difference.