Questions to Noam Bardin, CEO Waze (Géolocalisation)

 Can you tell us about Waze? 

Waze is a driving community of drivers who help each other improve our daily commute. Wazers help build the map itself, add names and keep it up to date, they help mark traffic, automatically by driving with the app and they manually mark other hazards, such as speed cams, policemen, construction, hazards and others. We make our app fun and social to help make the commutte more interesting with a variety of geo-games and automatic interfaces with twitter, Facebook and Foursquare. 

How did you get the innovative idea? 

Ehud Shabttai, one of the founders, started the company as a way of building a navigable map without having to buy it from the incumbent map providers. This way the map can be updated daily, by the community and can be distributed for free. Ehud had tried to build such a community on one of the incumbent maps but they threatened to sue him claiming he was infringing on their IP, in-spite of the innovation and value to the consumers – so he deleted it and began building it from scratch. 

How many users do you have? 

We have close to 900,000 users globally, building driving communities and maps in over 100 countries. 

What is your business model? 

Today we sell the data we collect to third parties needing real time data.

How do you see the future of GPS applications ? 

The next waze of GPS applications is moving away from pure navigation (10-20% of our drives when we don't know where we are going) to daily driving (the other 80-90% of the everyday drives) – imagine that every time you get into your car you turn on your GPS system (on your phone) and you have a virtual helicopter over you, warning you about hazards, speed cams and traffic, finding the best route, showing you where your friends are, where there are discounts in stores, finding and displaying your facebook friends and helping make your everyday drives better.