Great for me as a Google shareholder. Bad as an Angeleno fighting SoCal traffic.
No GPS/maps system seems to offer the option for FasTrak or carpool lane.
No GPS/maps system offers a way to tell a driver in a carpool lane if they have to change several lanes to the right to merge onto another freeway, or if there is a new carpool lane opening up to your left that takes you directly onto the next freeway you way to get on.
This is what happens when you have an oligopoly (Garmin, Google/Waze, Apple) and everyone's product, design and sales people are in the Valley or Tel Aviv and not more driver-centric cities with much more traffic and orders of magnitude more route options like Los Angeles.
I was in LA last week (vacation + rental car) and Google Maps definitely sent me to the express lanes on the I95 every time. They had the exact knowledge of the entrances and merges back.
As an aside, yesterday I was traveling upstate NY and to get off from I87 to some local road, Google Maps navigated me to a "Tandem Area", which was also marked that way by a sign and was indeed the right choice. Of course, I'd never turn myself from a highway to a Tandem Area ;)
So it seems like they have a lot of small detail knowledge.
About a year ago I used Google Android navigation to get to a Walmart. Unlike other GPS which just take you to a street address, the Google system knew the Walmart was in a large lot and navigated me to the store within the lot.
At least they said 'the I95,' which at least makes it sound like it's in California.
Dialects are interesting. In my native Pittsburgh, I always said 'Route 28' or maybe '79,' but now that I'm in LA, I always say 'take the 405 to the 10.'
Thanks ddw! Another HN user pointed out in the comments here that TomTom has carpool lane option. And I'd be another passionate founder who can't program or do development.
TomTom includes carpool lanes in their planning for routes in the United States. I've seen it in California and Connecticut. A big red screen shows up and asks "Route uses carpool lanes -- is this ok?". If I am driving alone, then I just hit "No".
Interesting development (if it's true - as we all learn, deals have a way if changing a LOT at the last minute).
I'd thought a FB acquisition would have been very important for FB -- it would have given them user-provided location info down to the foot for 50M people, which seems to me right up FB's alley (Where are you? Where are your friends? Where are you going? Where are they going?).
For Google, this will obviously cement their domination in the mapping space. As it is, they're so vastly far ahead than others (I think I heard from a friend who works there that they have 10,000+ people on the Maps team worldwide?)
Either way, Waze is awesome and despite the cynicism around what the big guys sometimes do, I can only imagine this making the app better and better.
Google has 35k engineers, out of which maybe 2-3k work on Maps. The 10k number probably refers to total number of workers (mostly contractors) that contribute to Maps: Street View, testing, imagery, notation, etc.
Google has 38,739 employees. 90% of them are engineers? No way. When I was there, MTV campus was like 35% engineering.
From Google Q1 2013 earnings report:
"Headcount – On a worldwide basis, we employed 53,891 full-time employees (38,739 in Google and 9,982 in Motorola Mobile and 5,170 in Motorola Home) as of March 31, 2013"
I was really looking forward for Waze's Windows Phone app[1] to come out of beta, but now, given Google's stance on Windows Phone, the app will most likely be killed :/ Atleast with an FB acquisition, it wouldn't have happened. These platform wars getting tiring.
This is a competitor to google's maps, the only thing they'd do is shut it down (or at least not make anymore updates, ah-la sparrow) and not integrate the ideas into Gmaps.
From the founders standpoint this makes total sense, though, it's obvious this was the end game because they had no money-making business model.
Yeah, I'm bummed to hear this news too, I've been rooting for them since the beginning. Granted Google Maps is way better than Waze, but, I think the whole crowdsourcing angle that Waze takes is interesting, and I think it's impressive how far they've gotten with a small team comparatively.
actually, as user of google Navigator, i'm dreading the moment waze will show up as a replacement for navigator (as hangouts now replaces gtalk) and I will not be able to get directions without a google+ account and publishing my location to my friends all the time.
Map was never free data - I think they started with OSM, but later switched to a proprietary data source (and of course, they are crowdsourcing more data and updates from users)
I'm not sure they even started with OSM. I remember in the very early days I could select the 'bulldozer' icon and add new roads to the maps. People used to ask why the maps weren't as good as OSMs, but the maps got better very quickly because - I suppose - everybody's journeys were added to the maps.
Can someone with deep knowledge about Waze or the market explain why it would be worth $1.3B? It seems to have okay but far from insane traction. The technology seems less than trivial but at google scale shouldn't be that hard to develop in house. Once developed, it can simply be built into Google Maps and get overnight traction. As such, using Waze to me seems like a hack anyway.
It's not (just) about acquiring new technology or users. It's about blocking competitors (Apple, Facebook, Microsoft) from getting as good as them, or better, at maps and navigation.
Google was, IIRC, the second widely reported suitor after Facebook; I don't see that there's much reason to see it as defensive rather than an acquisition to enhance a major existing offering -- AFAICT, lots of people that preferred Google Maps prior to Waze shifted to Waze, at least for at-the-moment navigation, due to Waze's social features which resulted in better realtime traffic and routing.
As waze is not true competitor for google per se, I would be very dissapointed, if it would go the way other google-acquired software often goes - integration into google services and product's discontinuation.
I do not believe (anymore) that google could acquire Waze and leave it as a standalone product. Which would mean lots of compromises in terms of community interaction because google has different approach to this than Waze does.
Even more - waze approach to handling UGC in terms of map editing is somewhat not perfect, but with google involvement it could be discarded (not fixed), since it's not trivial to come up with better way.
Google, i believe, is more interested in traffic data than in community map editing, but latter one gives Waze lots of its appeal.
For me the most interesting in this case is why nobody else wasn't interested enough, 1.3B is not that much of a money for other possible acquiree candidates to withdraw.
Facebook wanted to pull the Waze development center from Israel to the Valley. Waze's founder rejected this and demanded that the development will stay in Israel. This is why the deal with Facebook failed.
The deal with Google supposedly has a clause that for the next 3 years, Waze development will stay in Israel.
Now this is really an interesting news. First facebook was trying hard to acquire it (http://mashable.com/2013/05/09/facebook-waze-1-billion/) and now google is all set to acquire it.
Hope whosoever acquires it makes better use of it.
I'm surprised not many people are pointing out the antitrust concerns here...There are a few competitors in the space, but there may be a strong case that Google is essentially buying out that Waze's capabilities and niche are only rivaled by that of Google.
I love the idea of crowdsourcing your speed to generate real-time traffic information. The other crowdsourcing features this brings don't seem very useful to me. Also, not sure this is worth $1.3B. Seems like another groupon or summly.
I would be very curious to see what google does with waze an integrating it to maps. I think it would have been much more interesting to see what Facebook would have done with it
What I trust even less than NSA and US intelligence is Israel's. We will have even less control on which entity or agency will have access to, what places or whom I'm visiting.
You know why your comment reeks of politics? Because technically it doesn't make any sense.
If you're a user of Waze now, if anything then the situation can improve for you. Now being a purely Israeli company Waze is surely more susceptible to Israel intelligence agencies tracking than as part of Google. Yes, it will likely become more susceptible to U.S. intelligence agencies now, but this is not what your comment was about.
You do realize that Waze has always been an Israeli company, and you probably also know that nearly every major tech company (Google, Microsoft, Motorola, Intel, Apple, HP, etc) has an office in Israel that makes major contributions to their products.
Not trusting Israel has as much to do with hating Jews as not trusting the Vatican has to do with hating Catholics.
Google is significantly less under the thumb of the Israeli government than any Israeli company is. If push came to shove Google could close their Tel Aviv operations rather than comply. They couldn't do the same with the US government and any Israeli company couldn't do the same with the Israeli government.
Waze never was anything but an Israeli company, so I don't understand Salim's comment, and I've removed the part about hate, because it was to political.
Two, when my data is in US, there is still some hope that now or in the future the 4th amendment will provide some privacy. Or some amount of protection. When that data is not here, there is even less protection. Especially countries with strong motivations or history of selling or sharing intelligence. If Waze was in Saudi Arabia, Dubai/UAE, Pakistan, etc. I would have made the same comment, if anything, there is probably more transparency in Israel than the other countries I mentioned.
That being said. I stand by my comment. Israel has done a great job commercializing some of their intel research into a thriving IT sector (i.e. Startup Nation) but that also makes me suspect there is strong ties between their IT sector and their intel community, hence my mistrust.
Every company operating in every country is bound to that country's laws. So Google in China has to accept the Chinese government demands, and Google Maps in Israel already cooperates with security restrictions in Israel, just like Waze probably cooperates with the NSA for its Palo Alto office.
However, Waze using a dynamic map is able to provide mapping for the West Bank as well. While Google opened up its navigation app a few months ago in Israel, it has not been opened for the West Bank (possibly because of map licensing restrictions that similarly prevented opening it for Israel for so long).
No GPS/maps system seems to offer the option for FasTrak or carpool lane.
No GPS/maps system offers a way to tell a driver in a carpool lane if they have to change several lanes to the right to merge onto another freeway, or if there is a new carpool lane opening up to your left that takes you directly onto the next freeway you way to get on.
This is what happens when you have an oligopoly (Garmin, Google/Waze, Apple) and everyone's product, design and sales people are in the Valley or Tel Aviv and not more driver-centric cities with much more traffic and orders of magnitude more route options like Los Angeles.