

Google set to acquire Waze for $1.3B - calanya
http://www.globes.co.il/serveen/globes/docview.asp?did=1000850934&fid=1725

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tyang
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.

~~~
smok
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.

~~~
raldi
I95 is 3000 miles from LA.

~~~
steveklabnik
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.'

~~~
cbr
While in Boston "the [number]" would mean a bus.

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nlh
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.

~~~
acchow
10000 people on Maps doesn't sound right. There are about 35k Googlers
(excluding Motorola). 1/3rd on Maps? Implausible.

~~~
ngoel36
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.

~~~
acchow
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"

[http://investor.google.com/earnings/2013/Q1_google_earnings....](http://investor.google.com/earnings/2013/Q1_google_earnings.html)

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vxNsr
NOOOOOOOOooooooooo!!!!

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.

~~~
ronreiter
Don't worry, Google isn't that type of company. You won't even feel it.

~~~
polarix
Uh, hah? Haha?

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beagle3
Latest available source code is for v2.4 here
[http://www.waze.com/wiki/index.php/Source_code](http://www.waze.com/wiki/index.php/Source_code)
\- newer versions are not free software.

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)

~~~
cormullion
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.

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badclient
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.

~~~
ajju
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.

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Tloewald
Presumably this is defense against Apple (or Samsung) getting it.

~~~
dragonwriter
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.

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laacz
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.

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atirip
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.

~~~
Peaker
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.

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techaddict009
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/](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.

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arindone
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.

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slacka
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.

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danielcampos93
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

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salimmadjd
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.

~~~
nadav
Salim, let me guess. You don't have a problem with all Israelis, only with the
Israeli jews.

~~~
enraged_camel
Stay classy.

