Just ten or twenty years ago, driving to a new location meant taking out your folding road atlas,
and making a note of every turn, crossroad and roundabout that was to come on your route.
But these days the answer lies in the palm of your hand, with the likes of Google and Apple pointing
you to your destination every step of the way. And today, we’ll be discussing Waze,
the community based app that does things slightly differently to its rivals.
So why exactly did Google acquire Waze 8 years ago,
And how does the app differ from services like Google and Apple Maps
Here’s How It Happened.
The roots of Waze can be traced back to Israel in 2006,
as founder Ehud Shabtai developed a community project called FreeMap,
which relied on crowd sourcing to produce a map of Israel entirely in Hebrew.
Members of the community were required to download the app whenever they drove around,
and their movements would be used to map the roads of the whole country.
4G or even 3G technology had yet to become widespread, and so the mapping
took place entirely offline, only uploaded after users returned home,
plugged their phone or GPS device into their computer,
and added their journey to the Map Editor that would connect everyone’s roads together.
After kicking off with just a few hundred drivers across Israel, the application had
received tens of thousands of downloads by 2009 and had also obtained a new name: Waze.
By then the company had conducted its first funding round, raising $12 million, and appointed
a business savvy CEO, Noam Bardin, who had already founded voice recognition service Deltathree.
Waze was becoming a social platform too, allowing for users to send messages about
traffic incidents or potential hazards, and quirkier elements
like the Pac Man avatar appearing when a road is being tracked for the first time.
In 2010, a further $25 million was raised, by which time the app had
amassed over 2 million users, and a Series C round took place less than a year later.
The company was soon seeking to monetise the millions of users at their disposal,
adding small advertising space across the app’s interface based on location,
and negotiating with American news outlets to use their traffic updates to keep drivers informed.
Waze was named Best Overall Mobile App by the GSM Association, which was enough to
convince Google to part with around a billion dollars to acquire the Israeli startup in 2013.
Even following its big money takeover, Waze continued to live true to its original
crowdsourcing model, as Wazers could record speed traps, update house numbers and alert
the app of any other information that could be useful, all shared and stored anonymously.
And the improvements have come thick and fast, offering voice commands from
the likes of Morgan Freeman and Arnold Schwarzenegger or to record their own,
as well as partnerships with products like Spotify, Google Assistant and YouTube Music,
to integrate as seamlessly as possible into users’ daily activities.
To their credit, Google allowed Waze to operate independently of Google Maps,
a strategy that has proven successful for Facebook’s acquisitions of WhatsApp and
Instagram, which encouraged Bardin to stay on as CEO.
While Google Maps has been developed as an all-in-one transportation app, encompassing
driving, walking, public transport and even flights to name just a few of their options,
Waze has remained totally devoted to driving, creating a more streamlined service that
offers greater customisation for those travelling by road,
all while taking a more community-driven approach, compared to Google’s emphasis on data.
So why is Waze’s user base only a fraction of its big brother’s?
The answer lies partly in the name, with Google offering a much better known,
and for some, more trustworthy brand. Applications like Gmail, Chrome
and Google Drive can already be found on billions of smartphones worldwide,
and Google Maps feels like a satisfying addition to many of these users.
Of course Waze has no relevance to those without a drivers licence or live in dense
cities where driving is rarely necessary, while faults have also been found in the app itself.
For example, the feature of marking roadside police offers has drawn
critics for undermining road safety and posing a risk to the cops themselves
And its interface, although more modern and minimalist,
has often been described as cartoonish, and there have been suggestions that
the overly bright graphics could prove a distraction for drivers.
In spite of the app’s 140 million users, Bardin stepped down from his role in early 2021,
describing himself as “Worn down by the nature of the beast”,
and citing the reduced risk-taking following Google’s involvement.
His successor, Neha Parikh arrives after successes at Hotels dot com and Hotwire,
and is tasked with helping the firm recover from the effects of the global
pandemic and hopefully become the number one in road navigation.
And that’s how it happened.
Thanks for watching.