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, Interesting)
Waze crowdsources routefinding, which is a huge computational problem. I imagine that like Dodgeball the technology, but not the actual user experience, will ultimately be merged into the larger Google Maps crowdsourcing operation.
This is a huge blow for Apple, who simply don't have Google's mapping resources and really need a way to bootstrap their maps improvement efforts. They don't have a web based map system to draw on, and as bad as Apple Maps is, the most pernickety users - the ones most likely to file correction reports - have moved back to the Google Maps app. Well, I know I have.
(That stupid "legal" link in the corner of even the tiniest API-provided, in-app map is exactly the sort of nonsense Apple is supposed to not do!)
Re:Geotarding? (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a huge blow for Apple, who simply don't have Google's mapping resources and really need a way to bootstrap their maps improvement efforts. They don't have a web based map system to draw on, and as bad as Apple Maps is, the most pernickety users - the ones most likely to file correction reports - have moved back to the Google Maps app. Well, I know I have.
Other than some well publicised issues at launch time I've found that for me Apple Maps works at least as well as Google Maps. Maybe its down to where you are in the world.
At what point did you go back to Google Maps? Was it following the initial criticism and based on the reports of others or was it after you'd used it for a while?
Re:Geotarding? (Score:5, Interesting)
I gave it until the Google Maps standalone app launched, plus about a fortnight. It simply wasn't improving quickly enough in my region (which is not the US) despite my filing error reports daily. I check in on it now and then, and it took them four months to notice that the shopping centre in which one of their own stores was located was not, in fact, a large park. (In fact, most places with "park" in the name were marked out as parks, regardless of whether it made any sense...) Several other issues remain unresolved to this day.
A lot of my issues aren't with mapping data but design. It's presented like a car SATNAV with lots of POI icons for food etc. prioritised over things like road names, railway stations, major universities, etc. so while it's probably good when you're driving it's very hard to read as a pedestrian. Even the colour contrast is terrible, it's all cold-toned pastel shades for everything. That's one I can't see improving any time soon.
Not sure this is good (Score:4, Interesting)
Instead of wasting so much money, I wish Google had investing in something much more worthwhile like offline navigation.
Re:Not happy (Score:5, Interesting)
Every time I've tried to use waze it overheated my phone so much it was physically uncomfortable to hold, google navigation on the other hand behaves nicely. If they take waze's features and google's performance I'd be happy.