Google reportedly buying Waze

Which Waze is this going to go? And by that, I am talking about the business called Waze, an Israeli business that did not exist in 2007. Now, the talk of the town is that Google are the most successful bidder and are willing to pay somewhere in the region of 1 billion Dollars for the business that isn't (in human terms) at junior school yet. 80 whole employees, with 10 in California, the rest in Israel. Now before you say, Israel, what is that about, remember that Israel has outside of North America the highest number of listed companies on the NASDAQ, per territory. Israel has more university graduates as a percentage of their population than any other country in the world. Israel apparently produces more scientific papers per capita and files more patents per capita than any other country in the world. Seems like relatively low rainfall, clear air and moderate temperatures mixed in with clever people make the perfect cocktail for human ingenuity!


So what do Waze do? Well, Byron actually showed me the application about 9 months ago, it helps make your life easier from a traffic flow point of view. Which makes Google a more perfect fit actually, rather than the other suitors who have been bandied around, Facebook and Apple were also suggested to have "wanted" Waze. We will see, I would like to see the announcement soon. Check out the Time piece: Here's Why Google Wants to Buy Waze, a Red Hot Map App, for $1 Billion. Good for them! Here is to fostering innovation here locally, so that we can have an innovative information technology part of our economy.

I signed up to Waze (I had the app already) and got this little starter alert:

That is just "my area" and in the last week. Amazingly this is pretty much like the Wikipedia of traffic, with the community moderating. And yet another example of how the community as a collective makes life easier for each other. I wonder whether the intention, when the founders started Waze was to make the world easier to navigate and be the premier application globally (they actually won most innovative application for 2013), or the motivation was to make money. You will probably find that by starting off with trying to make the world easier, the second outcome came.