1 Good Reason – Social Marketing

BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front) I strongly recommend that you get Waze, and give it patience.  It’s not great in the US yet, but crowd sourced GPS navigation and traffic reporting has the promise to be a killer app for smart phones.

Interestingly, it turns out that according to the company Waze, the most costly part of building a new GPS system is getting good maps.  Google’s maps are excellent because they employ a small army of people who drive all day every day, taking pictures and updating the maps.  I’ve been a fan of Google’s Maps for years and there’s a cottage industry of people trying to get things into pictures in the Google streetview maps. 

But I think that Social Media, crowd sourcing and the collective intelligence of the connected world can solve this problem better cheaper and faster than Google, or any centralized system.  And along comes a great little app called Waze, (available for iPhone, Android and Windows mobile) which solves the problem of mapping with crowd sourcing.  Basically as you drive around with your phone using Waze. (Leave your phone plugged into your car charger because it uses lots of power to navigate and communicate) the system uses your real world experiences to update the maps.  The system collects your real time traffic, and routing and shares that info with everyone else.

So with Waze you get real time traffic reporting from people driving around, and free GPS turn by turn directions, with voice prompts, on your iPhone, Android or Windows Mobile device.

As an example, if you sit still or move along a under 10 MPH for too long Waze will record that fact and ask you, “Are you experiencing traffic?” When you reply that info is fed into the system and passed along to all of the other users in your vicinity.  This is real time traffic reporting by people automatically as it happens.  So it’s not just the major roads, but any road with a Waze user driving on it.

In addition, Waze puts little dots on roads if no one has ever driven upon a road. When you drive a road for the first time your icon changes into something resembling a little Pac-Man and you start gobbling the dots.  Each dot is a point and you are given your score and your standing amongst Waze users in your country.  You also get points for reporting traffic, police, construction, and map problems.

According to the company’s website, they are the #1 source traffic information in Israel, with the best and most up to date maps in the country.  They are also growing fantastically in Italy. 

My experiences driving in Northern NJ is that the maps are poor and so is the navigation.  So if I’m going somewhere old that I know where I’m going, I’ll use Waze because I can improve it’s maps and directions.  If I’m going somewhere new,  that I don’t know, I’m using Google Maps on my iPhone because Waze is too unreliable today.

That’s the challenge for Waze, to get enough early adopters to use the system and make it good enough for the general population to then take to using it.  If they can achieve this critical mass of people using the service in the US, it will without a doubt the best real time navigation and traffic reporting system available.  If they can’t get enough people using it, it will be another abandoned wreck on the information highway.

I think this is a great little app, and I ask all of my friends who have a compatible phone to get this app and try it out.  Be patient because it’s not great yet.  But I really believe that crowd sourcing this type of info is the future.  It’s only a matter of time before someone takes advantage of the latent knowledge that is out there and combines it for all of us to benefit.

Full Disclosure: I have no connections to Waze, it’s sponsors, advertisers, or anyone else with the company (to my knowledge).  I just like the product and think it needs a boost to really cross the line and do well.

Posted via email from ckieff’s posterous

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