Do you know of Waze? If you are a user, you love it.
Let me tell you what Waze is and why it is so important to keep it away from Apple.
Waze seems silly at first. I installed it on an old iPhone in years past very early, then I put it on Androids the past couple of years. I use a Galaxy S3 from Verizon, and have really only learned how important Waze is in the past six months.
Waze is a combination navigation system and a social driving network. I thought it was kind of stupid at first as who should be sending messages while they are driving? People do little updates on traffic, and it pops up in areas where the traffic is particularly intense. I thought that was kind of bad. Well, then I found that you could get the average speed on highways you are driving on. They even color code roads as they get slower.
This is not some traffic central updating billboards telling you how many minutes it takes to get to the next big highway. This is the live traffic speeds on the road you are traveling on based on others traveling anywhere from a few hunded feed to a few miles ahead.
I live in the Dallas / Fort Worth “Metroplex.” Like any major area, staying with a freeway too long can cause you an hour of sitting in traffic. You think, “if only I had known.” If you had known it was going zero miles per hours on Interstate 75 from Allen to 635, you would have bailed and found an alternate way. There are tons of alternate routes, you just have to know in advance of that last exit before everything grinds to a sudden halt.
With Waze you know to hop off the freeway early because you are able to see problems even before they back-up to where you are. You might be going 70 miles per hour, but you know that starting three exits ahead, it is total chaos. You know there are big problems. If you enable the pop-ups (which I don’t) you will know exactly what is happening.
By default, when I put my phone in my car I open the Waze app without even thinking about it. I use it to drive. It is so great that you can simply have it on and know that once things get bad, it will be obvious several minutes ahead. In Dallas or any similar metro, that is a wonderful thing. I can imagine it is even greater for those that drive for a living.
Apple apparently wants this company. That’s a disaster if you use Android, as Apple has this annoying habit of cutting off competitive platforms once they do an acquisition.
Let’s hope that Google has been secretly looking at Waze and steps in with a real offer.
To the people at Waze: Don’t do it. How can you put hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars ahead of providing a great free service? Maybe even a billion dollars? How can that mean more to you than working hard every day providing a great free service?
MORE INFO:
If you don’t use Waze, you need to get cool:
Android Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.waze&hl=en
Apple iTunes Store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/waze-social-gps-traffic-gas/id323229106?mt=8