
Apple did offer to buy Waze, but Waze politely declined - derpenxyne
http://thenextweb.com/apple/2013/01/04/apple-definitely-did-intend-to-buy-waze-but-waze-politely-declined/
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jessedhillon
I stopped using Waze after December of 2011. They have these powerups that
they put all over the virtual road, and you hear a crunching noise as your
phone character drives over and eats them. Well, in December they felt it was
very important that you know that Waze was going to be dropping Santa hats as
well, so they placed a popup blocking the entire screen, which (due to a bug I
suppose) could not be dismissed. I nearly missed a flight because I was
running late and badly needed directions to LAX, but instead Waze pnly wanted
to give me news about Santa hats. Finally I pulled over and pulled up LAX on
IOS maps.

Prior to that, I used it for probably a year and raved about it to everyone.
But annoying things like this crept in and destroyed my enthusiasm. For
example, there was an option to have Waze prioritize driving over powerups
when computing routes -- who wants that!? And the brevity/frequency settings
for the voiceover directions were wanting -- either hear a command three times
before you have to turn, or hear a slightly shorter command three times, or
get no audible direction.

What occurred to me in December was that these guys were spending a lot of
time on gamification when there were core UI/UX issues which needed
addressing. Fundamentally, you're taking someone who has to get somewhere (in
a hurry, perhaps) and making them play a very lame game.

But they've raised ~$70M so they have a long time to get it right.

Edit: at this time I didn't know how to kill running apps on IOS. I had just
gotten my iPhone a month earlier.

~~~
albemuth
Not sure if this was the case back in 2011, but all of the features you
mentioned regarding power-ups can be disabled in the settings pane. As to the
voice directions, your experience seems very different to mine, maybe it's
time to give it another chance.

~~~
cstejerean
I have the same issues with voice direction. It repeats the same instructions
way to frequently, often without even a pause in between. For example, earlier
today:

"Take exit for XXX. In 500 ft. stay to the right at XXX south. Stay to the
right at XXX south".

~~~
rhizome
Hah, over New Year's we were talking about Apple Maps and how chatty it was,
thinking there should be a "bachelor mode" that just states all the directions
when you start and then shuts up and displays the route on the map.

~~~
Terretta
Hah, over New Year's we were talking about how we use Apple Maps when we don't
want calls interrupted, since it's so much less chatty compared to the
otherwise remarkably superior Navigon software.

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ynniv
In what world does a company with no monetization strategy turn down a $500M
acquisition? Who do they think is going to pay more for them, Yahoo!?

~~~
ry0ohki
One of the reasons to be very wary of taking funding... you may be forced to
turn down $500M because your investors aren't going to take a simple 2X
multiple.

~~~
jacquesm
Very few investors are going to turn down a $500M exit, even if it is only at
a 2X multiple.

Giving your investors the ability to torpedo a deal of that magnitude seems to
be a failure in its own right. So if you do get funding make sure you're not
handing over control over future exits.

What's good enough for the founders should be good enough for the investors.

A good set of 'drag along/tag along' clauses will take nicely care of that
possible scenario.

~~~
edouard1234567
I agree, it's unlikely investors would block a deal like this if the founders
want it. At $20 per user I think it's a very reasonable valuation for a
company at this stage, same type of valuation instagram and foursquare got.
However I do buy the fact that the founders believe they can create more value
and continue to grow.

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ramses0
Apple fails at social-interaction. They have no feedback loops, no community
involvement. Compare to google where the community-feedback loop is almost a
part of the product culture.

Waze has social integration (facebook), realtime community reporting (speed),
realtime community hazard reports (object on road), community map editing
(tweak routes, add roads).

I can't believe that Apple is so good at making "beautiful" things but so bad
at community engagement (gamecenter, ping, maps, *.mac, etc).

~~~
jpxxx
Quibble: Apple has been collecting realtime traffic data from Apple Maps users
since year one or two of iOS.

~~~
sigzero
That was when Apple Maps was actually Google Maps and using different data.

~~~
jpxxx
Correct, the tiles were from Google and Google got first cut of the route
information. But Apple was the one collecting vectors, and there's no reason
to think they were ever signing those over to Google.

~~~
georgemcbay
I'm sure that even if they weren't explicitly sharing the traffic information
with Google then Google was capable of (roughly) inferring the data based on
API calls anyway. While there would certainly be some noise there between new
tile fetches, you should be able to map out routes and speeds with a high
(though not exact) level of confidence, particularly in cases where you're
probably the one originally laying out the suggested route.

------
debacle
> While Waze has an impressive user base (20 million at last count and said to
> be nearing 30 million), the company has still not found a way to adequately
> monetize its product, or build a scalable business model to profit from.

How many more times do we get to watch this story play out?

~~~
sabat
It's been a successful strategy for many companies, however perilous it might
be.

~~~
jrockway
Which ones? (I'm not ready to call Twitter a success.)

~~~
hayksaakian
Twitter is so embedded in the worlds culture, I'm hard pressed to believe they
won't succeed

~~~
mbreese
Given how embedded they are, it's troubling that they still haven't figured
out how to make money off of it.

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gkoberger
Interesting. This doesn't seem like a good fit for me: Apple really just needs
better data, yet the accuracy is even worse for Waze than Apple's maps. Plus,
most of their product would probably never make it into iOS -- I can't see
Apple letting users report police locations, messaging other cars or
collecting items.

(Side note: just last month, Apple was reportedly in talks with FourSquare:
[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732490720457818...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324907204578186074223787936.html))

~~~
sisk
I have had wonderful accuracy with Waze. In fact, the one instance where I had
an issue (was told to turn left on a no left turn), I reported it (a well
exposed feature in the app) and it was fixed by the next time I drove by. I
think that's the real win with Waze as far as mapping goes (the realtime
traffic awareness is the number one feature over all): it's crowd sourced so
problems can be reported and will be fixed by community map editors (similar
to the Wikipedia model).

------
seanp2k2
Not that it would have made Apple Maps much better; Waze was always getting me
lost and sending me down sidestreets to end up at the dead-end residential
street behind the shopping center I intended to visit. To their credit, TomTom
does this as well sometimes, but in general it's a much better nav app
(granted it's like $40 vs. Waze at $0).

------
paulhauggis
I used Waze for awhile. The problem I have with it is that it's just not as
accurate as the alternatives. Not only would it get streets wrong, but
sometimes lead me in the wrong direction.

I got tired of this and switched over to Google maps (ios version). It's much
better.

~~~
chadzawistowski
I preferred Google Maps once I returned home for the holidays. Waze seems to
specialize in traffic data and rerouting, something which doesn't seem to work
all too well in rural areas.

While out in California, on the other hand, Waze managed to find a new route
into the city which saves me 20 minutes over Google Maps anytime I head that
way.

~~~
drbawb
I used to love Waze, because of the clever rerouting and the UI was pretty
slick for a free GPS app.

I'm thinking of switching to Google Maps though because their search is quite
frankly _better._ Which doesn't make sense to me, because my understanding is
that Waze just aggregates search results from several major sources. {Bing,
Google, Yahoo, etc.}

Around the holidays: Waze routed me to a store [first result] that had closed
and relocated [a few miles down the road].

Google Maps showed the same results, but they were ranked differently: the
closed or relocated store was annotated as such, and was ranked at the bottom
of the list.

I've also had Waze fail to take some addresses as input, for e.g: when the
house number has a WEST and SOUTH portion, that other apps can understand with
no problems.

I almost got lost because of that glitch.

I've just had too many problems with the Waze search to continue using it.
Which is a real shame, because I love the app itself.

~~~
cstejerean
One of the nice things about Waze is being able to switch the search engine it
uses for locating things. I've used that several times when it's default
search couldn't quite find what I was looking for.

~~~
drbawb
Even using that feature [e.g: to select Google] it doesn't seem to return the
same result set that Google's own application does.

I'm not sure if this is an issue with Waze itself, or possibly some
limitations built in to Google's 3rd-party API.

\---

Unrelated to that: I've also noticed that Waze is starting to display some
advertisements, which really bugs me in a GPS app. If this is how they intend
to monetize it, I really don't want to support it. I would gladly pay quite
handsomely for the service to get rid of adverts.

(I don't even like the idea of billboards to be honest: IMO any distraction
from the road that doesn't directly pertain to navigation is borderline
unethical.)

