July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

What if you could instantly change car navigation maps for other drivers whenever you encountered a closed road?

That’s the idea behind the social driving app Waze’s newest feature, which you specifically use to report road closures in real time, alerting other Waze users in the process.

The feature is a natural extension of what has made Waze essential for almost 40 million iPhone and Android users. The free app’s claim to fame how it reports traffic jams and other road hazards as you encounter them. Now with this new road closure feature, you’ll be able to directly affect Waze’s maps, which will then instantly reroute other drivers in your area.

You could call what Waze is doing “Smart GPS,” compared to the less-connected GPS offerings in cars and from companies like Garmin and TomTom.

“The one thing that nobody is crowdsourcing in the map space is real-time road closures, because it needs so many different things,” said Di-Ann Eisnor, Waze’s vice president of platform, in an interview with VentureBeat. “Things like a ticker tape parade after a sports team has won, a construction project that cities can’t keep track of, and roads closed due to snow. … Our roads are changing all the time, and Waze has been building the capability to take care of that.”

Eisnor tells me the company was inspired to offer the feature after it was tapped by FEMA and the White House to help out in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. Drivers were able to use Waze’s app to locate open gas stations (at the time, there was a gas shortage and many stations didn’t have power, which made it difficult to find gas). FEMA also took advantage of the data to determine where it routed fuel.

For Waze users, reporting a closed road is just as simple as reporting a traffic jam with the app. You just need to choose the reason behind the closure as well as its length (which you can often get from signage or police corralling traffic).

Behind the scenes, the road closure feature required some significant changes for the company. Waze previously relied on a standard amount of timing for issues like traffic jams, but closed roads can often last for several hours or days. The company had to integrate new messaging for its users as well as checks and balances to determine that a road was actually open.

At this point, Waze seems perfectly positioned to help cities learn more about the state of their roads. Eisnor said the company just closed a deal with Georgia’s Department of Transportation, which would give that state access to the company’s data. Waze is currently chatting with the transportation departments from other cities, including San Francisco.

“If you look at the three phases around our own community growth, there’s the beginning when we can crowdsource all that [driving] info, then there’s the validity we got that when we helped TV news stations, now we’re getting to a phase where I think we’ve realized as a society that crowdsourcing is that next step,” Eisnor said. “We’re actually going to be able to provide information to cities better than they had before.”

Waze is based in Palo Alto, Calif. and has raised over $55 million thus far.

Top photo via Shutterstock

We’ve seen a great deal of speculation in the past week about Apple buying a company to help it solve its nagging mapping headache. The big rumor, both started and squashed by TechCrunch, was Waze, the crowdsourced mapping and traffic app.

The only problem with that theory? Waze would only slow Apple down.

At least, according to Skobbler’s Marcus Thielking. He’s the cofounder of Skobbler, a spinoff from Navigon that sells one of the top mapping solutions in the world: GPS Navigation 2. It’s got a No. 1 sales ranking in app stores in 20 countries and has sold more than three million copies. It’s also based on OpenStreetMap, the crowdsourced “Wikipedia of maps.”

“There are only two companies that could possibly make sense for Apple to buy,” Thielking said this morning from Europe. “There’s Garmin, which doesn’t use TomTom, on which Apple Maps is built, and there’s TomTom itself. TomTom would be my bet.”

The problem that Apple faces? Buying just any mapping company is not a solution. Apple needs a quick fix — something on the order of months, not years — and buying a company with an incompatible dataset or base technology would ensure a long, painful integration process.

“Purchasing a company that has the talent but does not necessarily solve their issues right away … it could be feasible, but it would probably take a two-year time frame … and that’s not what Apple is looking for,” he told me.

And the core mapping technology is not even what Waze is focused on anymore, according to Thielking, who sees Waze as having pivoted from its initial vision of mapping toward traffic solutions for drivers. That’s significant, because the hard part of mapping is not necessarily the basic grid of the roads: It’s the details in navigation and the richness of local data.

That hard part is why Skobbler uses OpenStreetMap data. With more than a million contributions as of today or tomorrow, the dataset is unsurpassed in some regions — especially in hyperlocal data — and growing quickly in many others. But Apple can’t use OpenStreetMap, according to Thielking, since as a global company it cannot simply focus on the areas where OSM has good data — it needs a global solution with a fairly high global level of quality.

And it needs that solution quickly.

“Owning a digital map these days and especially in the future is an incredibly valuable resource. It’s very hard to copy and very fundamental to everything, particularly in an era of mobile solutions and mobile data,” Thielking says. “That is why Google is doing what they’re doing … and it’s one of the reasons why Apple is in this space.”

Apple wanted to trump Google’s mapping product, but blew it in terms of recognizing the massive complexity of any mapping product, Thielking told me.

All of which means that if there’s any company that Apple might or should be looking to acquire, it would be TomTom.

photo credit: Dunechaser via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

What a shock: Google Maps is not going to be available on Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet. Instead, Skobbler is launching ForeverMap 2 on Kindle Fire — and Nook – to take its place.

The Berlin-based company builds mobile navigation products based on OpenStreetMap data. And it sees a major opportunity in the obvious mapping void on probably the most popular non-iPad tablet platform.

“Amazon’s devices do not include pre-installed maps, and Google Maps isn’t even available,” said Skobbler co-founder Marcus Thielking in a statement. “We offer Kindle Fire users a solution that’s second to none in the Amazon App Store.”

Amazon can hardly expect Google to provide a mapping solution for Kindle, of course.

The giant online retailer and service provider has legally and ethically hijacked Android, the mobile operating system created by Google, to create Kindle, neatly excising Android’s links and hooks to Google services and replacing them with Amazon’s own content ecosystem. Google can’t feel good about that and so far hasn’t deigned to offer its apps on Amazon’s app store.

So Skobbler has jumped into the void.

And the company is offering an extremely interesting product: an open-source map built by 900,000 volunteers that is free for online use, with over 1,000 in-app purchases available at $0.99 and up that buy offline map access for cities, states, and countries. Cities are $0.99, states are $1.99, countries are $2.99, and continents are $5.99. Alternatively, for $9.99, Kindle Fire users can purchase complete and unlimited offline accessibility to all global maps.

In other words, it’s a great option for travelers who don’t want to pay cellular fees for data and roaming.

OpenStreetMap is a crowdsourced mapping project — a Wikipedia for maps — which Apple used in iPhoto at one point, FourSquare and other location-based social networking and mapping apps use, and some, including Thielking, believe will eventually surpass both Google and Apple’s current mapping solutions.

Nokia also provides a mapping solution on Kindle Fire, but Thielking says it is “extremely limited,” with insufficient detail and coverage.

ForeverMap 2 will be available on Kindle Fire and Nook later today.

photo credit: Oscar_Shen via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

As rumored earlier tonight, Google Maps is now available on the iOS app store. It’s completely revamped and, from my early experience, better than ever.

The new and updated Google Maps includes “accurate and easy to use maps,” (that wouldn’t be a dig at Apple now, would it?) with built-in local search and the Holy Grail that Apple had wanted earlier but Google had refused to provide: guided turn-by-turn navigation.

You may not be able to find the update on the app store app on your iPhone — not all of Apple’s servers have been updated, apparently. You should, however, be able to find it on the web here, or in iTunes on your Mac.

Other features include syncing searches between your computer and your phone (no more frantically re-tapping in directions you’ve already checked first on your laptop), transit directions including train, bus, and subways, and live traffic information.

Google Maps now includes street view, including 360-degree panoramas and the ability to see inside participating buildings and businesses (100,000+ worldwide).

The new Google Maps now has gesture support. One-finger swiping moves the map; two-finger swiping brings up options for traffic, transit, and satellite overlays. A single-finger tap zooms the map closer; a two-finger tap pans out. And, in a particularly nice touch (hah hah) grabbing and twisting the map re-orients it — an extremely helpful maneuver for those who want to get the map to align with the world they’re seeing.

Here’s a mini-gallery of the new Google Maps on iOS:

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Navigation technology startup Skobbler rolled out a new maps service today called ForeverMap 2 that aims to give Google Maps a run for its money.

ForeverMap 2 uses something called OpenStreetMap, which is an open-source GPS navigation data project that’s also used by Apple in its iOS maps. The new app is available on Android, and allows users to view maps on or offline. Its online maps are freely available, but viewing offline maps (either by city or country) requires an in-app purchase. The maps also provide users with better routes based on their mode of transportation, and allows them to bookmark locations or access Wikipedia-based descriptions for popular spots.

“We believe that our great experience with OpenStreetMap puts us in a unique position to offer modern smartphone and tablet users a powerful alternative to rival map services,” Skobbler co-founder of skobbler Marcus Thielking said in a statement.

The new Forevermap 2 Android app is available today in the Google Play store for $0.99, while additional city and state maps are available for $0.99 and $1.99, respectively. Skobbler said a version of the app should be available for the iPhone 5 in the near future, which will be nice for people who still haven’t found a decent replacement for Apple’s native Maps app.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Waze has been on a roll with its free crowdsourced GPS navigation apps, but today the company is getting even more social with an update that could change the way you drive forever.

Waze is launching version 3.5 of its iPhone and Android apps today, which add the ability to share trips with friends, track when friends are reaching your destination, and send pick up requests to friends (even if they aren’t using Waze). The new features are an obvious extension of Waze’s initial goals to make driving more social, and they also make the app more useful to drivers who didn’t have a need for Waze’s original crowdsourced navigation feature. It’s also yet another way for Waze to prove its worth after Apple released its own GPS navigation feature in iOS 6′s Maps app.

“We think a lot about how people are spending time in the car and what it means to be driving socially,” Di-Ann Eisnor, Waze’s vice president of platform, told VentureBeat in an interview. “The time that you’re in the car alone, it’s really just to get to one group of people or another … [we've been thinking about] how we can extend that experience.”

Waze says it now has 29 million drivers using its app, up from 26 million last month. The company recently added real-time gas information to its apps to make it easier to find the best gas deal.

Waze commissioned a survey by Omnibus with 1,000 U.S. drivers to get a sense of their driving behaviors, and it revealed that 52 percent of drivers picked up friends and family at least one to five times a month (and 20 percent did that daily). Twenty-eight percent of those polled also regularly picked up their kids, while 23 percent did the same for their spouse. Given that data, it made sense for Waze to focus on making those typical driving experiences easier.

By sharing your trip, your friends or family can easily see your progress as you approach a destination (over-protective parents will surely love this). And if you’re waiting on a large group of friends, the new app lets you see all of them approach you on a single map.

Most intriguing to me is the new pick up request feature, which sends out a text or push notification to the recipient and allows you to easily locate them without the need for an address. If the recipient isn’t using Waze, they’ll still be able to see an HTML5-powered map that tracks your approach.

Eisnor noted that Waze isn’t trying to compete with ridesharing apps like Lyft and Zimride: “If you look at the number of people who are just driving people around and picking people up, it’s a much bigger share of the market than people who are trying to rideshare — that’s more about carpooling. … What we’re doing is trying to make all of your driving more social.”

Other new features in Waze 3.5 include Facebook log-in, the ability to save your parking location, and useful information like toll fees.

Waze is based in Palo Alto, Calif. and has raised over $55 million thus far.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

On the traffic-clogged streets of Tel Aviv, every cab ride I experienced was either thrillingly close-to-illegal or brain-meltingly tiresome. But car rides were a little easier – and they all had one thing in common – each had an iPhone cradled in a hands-free stand, each toting Waze, the crowdsourced traffic guide that offers turn-by-turn navigation to help you scoot around town avoiding jams, police blockades and accident hotspots.

“No-one uses Google Maps here, or iPhone maps,” says Eli, one of our hosts for the week. “Everyone uses Waze. Look – here’s how many Waze users are on the road right now…” His screen is covered with pink, smiley speech bubbles, each one contributing to the traffic Hive Mind.

Since its launch in 2009, Waze has enjoyed a remarkable trajectory to the world’s largest crowdsourced traffic information service. Its growth has reached exponential level in the past half-year, with global users doubling to 20 million in the last six months and so far attracting over $65 million in funding from the likes of Kleiner Perkins and Horizon Ventures.

We went to the company’s Israeli headquarters to chat to co-founder and president Uri Levine about the route to Waze’s success.

Putting community in your commute

“We’re more or less growing at a rate of about two million users per month,” said Levine. “And the beauty is that the more users there are, the better the service becomes. When it reaches critical mass in a new territory, then we have a full map offering.”

And this is the Waze special sauce – the company didn’t spend hundreds of millions on mapping á la Google or invest heavily in custom-built navigation software like the old guard of sat-nav manufacturers. Instead, it provided an infrastructure that allows Waze users to add the information passively as they make their journeys.

Simply by being logged in to the app, you are transmitting data on your environment – and an extra layer on gamification rewards more active members of the Waze community, so logging uncharted areas, reporting traffic issues, etc all come with rewards and kudos from the community.

“As soon as we approach the tipping point of user uptake, all the good things start to happen,” said Levine. “That’s when we see the maps start to be navigable and the growth start to get exponential.”

Why Israel is “the perfect beta site”

This disruptive model of navigation that saw the small startup go up against giants such as Apple, Google, and traditional sat-nav manufacturers meant that Waze had to raise capital – and a lot of it –fast. Its A and B rounds brought in $37 million from US and Israeli sources Blue Run Ventures, Magma, and Vertex VC, while its recent Series C brought in $30 million from Kleiner Perkins and Li Ka Shing’s Horizon Ventures.

“Waze was always a disruptive approach. We wanted to do maps in a way that hadn’t been done before, and to disrupt the market you have to have a lot of funding,” said Levine. “But if you have a good product, there’s always money.”

“Israel was the perfect beta site for us. It’s very small and very dense. It is easy to get to a lot of people to use your product very quickly and to collect feedback. Waze was built on the ability to make mistakes fast and fix them fast – and Israel is a good place for that,” said Levine. “And we found the users and community in Israel to be very, shall we say, engaged. Outspoken.”

And because the traffic is pretty awful in Tel Aviv, too? “You know, it’s not so bad! I’m just back from São Paulo – that’s bad traffic. In places such as Mexico City, Bogota, Bankok, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Johannesbuurg – cities of over 10 million, that have had rapid growth, we see really terrible traffic – these are interesting areas for us…”

Cruising into new territories

And it’s these territories that would give Waze world-leading reach if it can gain “tipping points”, as well as in the US and China. The app is already trialing monetisation methods in its “beta ground”of Israel by offering drivers live advertising of stores and services along their route.

“What we learned over the last couple of years is how to bring drivers to the point of sale,” said Levine. “Commuters take the same trip every day, so we’ve seen them actually opt-in to discover what services or discounts are available along the way. They see this as added value. In some cases in the US, Waze drivers can get discounts for fuel as a group. There are six million users in the US, so that’s a big group to attract to your gas station – and everyone wins.

And it seems that the company even has its biggest predators snuggling up – the new turn-by-turn navigation in the next iPhone OS is using crowdsourced information from Waze, displaying the true clout of the product.

“OK, so Google Maps is on every Android, so it technically has more that 20 million users, and turn-by-turn is on iOS, but our focus is on creating a social network of drivers and offering more opportunities around that. And that’s how we want to expand the product – by offering more social aspects – the ability to see which of your friends are nearby, who will pick you up, tips on cheaper fuel, etc.”

The new roadmap

Can the company keep up with its spectacular growth? We were surprised by the company’s ultra-modest headquarters in Ra’Anana, a small city to the north of Tel Aviv that houses the 90-strong R&D center (and where, tellingly no photographs were allowed). Levine smiles: “We’re looking for new offices right now, we’ve pretty much outgrown this space.

“It’s a big problem… It’s very complex – you have millions of people that rely on your service, so you need to keep up to date and expand the product at the same time. You have to keep the user satisfied, which requires more engineering, more computing power, more resources. But, then, it’s the most enviable problem to have in business.”

This story originally appeared on VentureVillage, a VentureBeat syndication partner.

In conjunction with its public debut, Wifarer also announced that its software is fully implemented in the Royal BC Museum in Canada and in a pilot phase at Prudential shopping center in Boston. Partnerships with international airports, universities, and stadiums are currently in the pipeline.

The technology functions similarly to a GPS. It uses Wi-Fi signals to pinpoint a visitor’s location within a building and provides step-by-step navigational guidance. By opening the app, users have access to a full map of the building’s interior.

“Indoors isn’t the same as outdoors,” said CEO Philip Stanger. “Outdoors no one owns. You can map and monetize it as you want. Indoors is a different question because there are private concerns. Institutions and companies have put a lot of investment in building up value within these spaces, and are loathe to hand over mapping to someone else.”

This is one of the reasons a scrappy startup like Wifarer could distinguish itself from mammoth companies like Google, Microsoft, and Apple that also offer mapping technology. It strives to make its presence as transparent as possible and cedes control over to the venues to incorporate media and “branding assets” as they choose. The organizations can then use it as a tool to carry out their own goals without having to jump through corporate or proprietary hoops.

There are a plethora of use cases for the app. It could entail flight displays and departure information in an airport, or notifications about ongoing sales in a mall. Stanger gave the example of a trip to a science museum. A visitor can orient within the museum, get directions to the Woolly Mammoth display, and then receive curated information about the Woolly Mammoth while standing in front of it.

People can create their own, personalized tours based on their interests rather than wandering haphazardly around the exhibits. Those with a paralyzing fear of mummies can avoid the Ancient Egypt section, and it is a piece of cake to zero in on the source of a mouthwatering baking scent wafting through a mall (two puns, one sentence).

Wifarer is free for users to download and can transition smoothly from spot to spot. For example, if the science museum is near a shopping center, the app will shift to reflect a change in the user’s location, displaying new maps and site specific content.

The technology is complicated and has taken over two years to develop. It uses the signal from smart devices and Wi-Fi access points to provide real-time positioning, eliminating the need for expensive hardware. Venues pay an annual licensing fee for the software-as-a-service and from there, have control over how it is used.

The company currently has 15 employees with offices in Victoria, British Columbia and San Jose, Calif. It has bootstrapped up until now, and plans to begin fundraising in the fall.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Just in time for the Summer driving season, driving app Waze is today embarking on bold new territory: crowdsourcing the best gas prices.

With the latest version of the free Waze app, launching today, you’ll be able to find gas stations and compare their prices in real time. Even better, the company is offering exclusive gas discounts to users at participating stations. Waze also announced that it has reached 19 million users.

Waze’s apps, which are available on the iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Symbian phones, offer free turn-by-turn directions. But Waze’s true value is its vast amount of live traffic data. Crowdsourced entirely from its users, the data makes Waze a far more useful alternative to standalone GPS units.

Cheap gas apps like Gas Buddy and Fuel Finder have been around for some time, but Waze has the advantage of integrating its gas info alongside GPS routes.

Gas information is Waze’s first vertical attempt outside of its core crowdsourced navigation feature. Di-Ann Eisnor, Waze’s VP of platform and partnerships, said the company will slowly begin to explore other verticals as well.

Waze has also finally added the ability to use waypoints on your trips, allowing you to plot more than one location for a single journey. The company also has brought its nifty voice control feature to Android phones with this latest update.

Waze is based in Palo Alto, Calif. and has raised over $55 million thus far.

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Google has announced the newest hotness for Google Maps: offline mapping for Android and an insane wearable Street View camera (meaning more Street View images than before).

For Google Earth, the company is outfitting airplanes with Street View-like camera gear and flying them like high-tech crop dusters all over the earth’s surface to get photographic 3D data to display for users.

The bottom line is Google wants to make its mapping software more comprehensive, more accurate, and more usable.

The good word was delivered by Brian McClendon, vice president of Google Maps, at a press event in San Francisco this morning. The event has been a relatively hot ticket since we got our invite, mostly because of Apple’s decision to boot Google Maps off iOS in favor of its own 3D mapping software.

Currently, Google Maps covers 75 percent of the world’s service and includes images of more than 5 million miles around the globe, not to mention the 26 million miles of roads and highways for which Google can pull up driving directions.

Soon, you’ll also be able to use a new feature called “make available offline” to (duh) make the mapped area available when you’re offline, outside your 3G network, etc.

And while we’ve been accustomed to Street View imagery on streets (and even indoors), we’ll also be able to see the same quality of images for areas one can’t access via car. Google is crunching all the camera gear into a wearable backpack for Google-bankrolled explorers to wear while skiing, hiking, or otherwise slogging over the less navigable surfaces of the planet.

Here’s what the gear looks like:

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Thanks to its popular crowdsourced navigation app, Waze is sitting on a pile of valuable traffic data. Today the company announced an intriguing use for that data goldmine: powering your local TV station’s traffic reports.

Waze is launching a program to let any broadcast network take advantage of its citizen traffic data, which gives networks access to instant updates about traffic conditions. The company has partnered with 12 launch stations, which have been featuring Waze’s data in their traffic reports for months, including KABC Los Angeles, KGO-TV San Francisco, and KFAA Dallas.

Waze’s free apps, which are available on the iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Symbian phones, offers free turn-by-turn directions. But Waze’s true value is its vast amount of live traffic data. Crowdsourced entirely from its users, the data makes Waze a far more useful alternative to standalone GPS units.

“We’re thrilled to officially offer up our citizen traffic reporting to broadcasters,” Di-Ann Eisnor, Waze vice president of partnerships and platforms, said in a statement today. “We’re learning that the best local stations work at startup speed, so we can get each station up and running seamlessly in just under a week.”

Waze says it’s providing tools specifically for broadcast stations, including the ability to create branded commuter groups within its apps. This lets broadcasters directly communicate with their viewers, allowing for things like contests to choose a specific user’s traffic report. Waze says that ABC7 in Los Angeles has nearly 3,400 active members in its commuter group. While on-air, traffic reporters use an iPad to get access to Waze’s live data.

The company also announced that its apps are now being used by over 9 million commuters. That’s a jump of 2 million users since October, when Waze announced it raised an additional $30 million in funding. Clearly, the company has been growing like wildfire over the past few years, and this jump to powering TV traffic reports will only further its popularity among mainstream users. Once viewers see what Waze’s free apps can offer, they’ll have a hard time resisting the siren call.

Waze is based in Palo Alto, Calif. and has raised over $55 million thus far.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

There’s no stopping Waze, the crowdsourced app that offers free GPS navigation. The company announced today that it has raised another $30 million in growth funding, led by Horizon Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Waze also confirmed that it has topped over 7 million users, thanks to its aggressive global expansion.

The news comes on the heels of Waze’s recently launched 3.0 version, which boasts a revamped design, search integration, and more. The company’s free app, which is available on iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Symbian phones, offers free turn-by-turn directions. Waze’s claim to fame is the generous amount of live traffic data it has access to, which is powered completely by user contributions.

The company says it will use the additional funding to support its growing user base, as well as help bring its service to China. “Expanding to China, the world’s fastest growing automotive and smartphone market, is an obvious next move for us,” Waze CEO Noam Bordin said in a statement today.

Along with the funding, Waze is adding to its board John Malloy, managing partner at Blue Run Ventures, and Jason Wong from Horizon Ventures. Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker is also joining as a strategic advisor and board observer, and she’s joined by Josh Silverman, former Skype CEO and currently president of American Express’s US consumer division.

Palo Alto, California-based Waze previously raised $25 million in funding last December.

Waze says the funding will be used to “expand corporate and marketing initiatives,” build up its core infrastructure, and increase its staff as the company moves its headquarters from Tel Aviv to Palo Alto. In an interview, the company told VentureBeat that its investors were particularly enthusiastic over the phenomenal engagement it’s seeing from users. Waze just recently surpassed 2.2 million users — up from a mere 500,000 in January.

The company’s app, which is available on iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Symbian phones, offers free turn-by-turn directions. Waze’s claim to fame is the generous amount of live traffic data it has access to, which is powered completely by user contributions.

Given its tremendous growth, Waze tells me that it will be spending quite a bit of time scaling its infrastructure. Everything on the platform is done in real-time, so the company can’t afford to have any slowdowns as it attracts more users.

Waze says its next big goal is to open up its platform, perhaps with some sort of API so that developers can take advantage of its data. Potentially, that would allow Google to take advantage of Waze’s live traffic data in its Maps Navigation app on Android phones. The company tells me that it’s also looking into bringing its application directly into cars that support apps, like those equipped with Ford’s Sync technology (which is developed by Microsoft). Waze could make its way into cars as early as two years from now.

The funding round was led by Blue Run Ventures and saw participation from other existing investors Magma Venture Partners and Vertex Venture Capital. Qualcomm Ventures also joined in on the round as a new investor.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

More speed bumps lie ahead for in-car navigation devices. As maps are becoming a standard feature in smartphones, handheld devices are truly taking over the navigation market for cars, according to a recent report by market research firm iSuppli.

The report indicates that smartphones have already become the most important platform for maps and navigation, and the number of smartphone-based navigation systems will increase tenfold this year, not to mention hitting numbers nearly forty times bigger by 2014. Last year, smartphone-based navigation systems (ie. phones with navigation systems either preloaded into them, or downloaded after purchase) hovered at 8 million units. This year, the projection is 81 million units, and by 2014 the number of units will explode to 297 million.

While this means declining sales for actual GPS navigation devices (like the ones manufactured by Garmin, TomTom, Magellan, or Nokia), the demand for software will increase. Nokia is including its Ovi Map turn-by-turn navigation software in its smartphones for no revenue, because it owns the map supplier, Navteq. Google offers its navigation for free on phones with its Android operating system such as the Nexus One and Motorola’s Droid. Other handset manufacturers will need access to low-cost maps –- which are increasingly available -– to offer free, preloaded navigation systems on their smartphones.

The iPhone dominates the market currently for aftermarket navigation (iSuppli’s term for navigation systems downloaded into smartphones after purchase) by accounting for nearly half of all sales, estimated at 2.9 million applications in 2009. And Apple makes revenue for the sales of navigation apps as it gets a 30 per cent cut from apps sold in its App Store -– $87 million in Apple’s pocket this year, calculated at 5.8 million units with an average price of $50.

However, the market for preloaded navigation systems will completely overshadow the navigation systems downloaded later on, the study predicts — embedded applications will account for some 250 million units by 2014, leaving downloaded applications at around 40-50 million units.

Even though smartphones are gaining a strong foothold in the navigation systems market, in-car devices still have a few advantages, not least of which is a large screen for easy reading. That being said, the stand-alone devices will have a rough ride in the future as they are squeezed between smartphones and so-called in-dash devices (or pre-installed devices in cars.) And it shows: Garmin’s revenue fell by 15 percent to $221 million in the previous quarter, as reported by Reuters.

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