Google To Buy Waze For $1.3 Billion

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."

Comments

Re:Geotarding?

[Sockatume]

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!)