Waze and the map that never stopped moving
On a balcony in Ra’anana in 2006, Ehud Shabtai held a GPS receiver his wife had given him and made a simple observation: the device knew the roads perfectly and knew nothing about the roads at all. It could tell him every turn between his apartment and the motorway but had no idea the motorway was standing still. Every other driver in Israel was also stuck. None of them were in the device.
Shabtai was a software developer, a veteran of Unit 8200 — Israel’s signals-intelligence corps — and, by his own admission, not particularly gifted at finding his way to places. He started a community project called FreeMap Israel to build a free Hebrew-language map of the country, sourced from volunteers. By 2008 he had co-founders: Amir Shinar, who ran engineering, and Uri Levine, who handled business strategy. They incorporated as Waze Mobile Ltd. and rewrote the ambition. The goal was no longer a static map. It was a map that would learn.
The idea was almost embarrassingly simple. If a thousand drivers were already moving through Tel Aviv with phones in their pockets, make those phones report back. Speed, location, any incident a driver chose to flag — a police car on the shoulder, a pothole, an accident around the bend. The app aggregated the signals and rerouted anyone behind the problem. Every user was simultaneously passenger and sensor.
What Waze built was different in kind from what Google Maps or MapQuest offered. Those were published documents — extraordinarily detailed, periodically updated, accurate but frozen. Waze was a conversation. When it launched internationally in 2011, drivers on three continents were flagging speed traps and sharing alternative routes in real time. The map was always a few seconds behind reality and always catching up.
The acquisition drama, when it came in 2013, was distinctly Israeli in flavour. Facebook moved first, circling Waze at roughly a billion dollars. The talks collapsed when Facebook insisted the team relocate from Ra’anana to California. The Waze founders declined. Facebook walked. Google submitted a competing $1.15 billion offer that the board was legally required to consider; Facebook never countered. Google announced the acquisition on June 11, 2013 for a reported $1.3 billion, with nearly 50 million users folded into the deal. The team stayed in Ra’anana.
What Waze proved was that a map could be a living document. The Cassini cartographers had taken decades to survey France. The Ordnance Survey had dispatched surveyors on horseback. Waze’s surveyors were the drivers themselves, millions of them, filing reports from behind the wheel. The map updated while you drove on it. The distinction between the chart and the place it described quietly collapsed.
The GPS device Shabtai’s wife gave him could not talk to other drivers. Fifty million drivers, it turned out, could talk to each other — and the maps that came after were never quite static again.
Sources
- Waze — Wikipedia — Founding details, FreeMap Israel origins, acquisition price and date, user numbers.
- Google Buys Waze — TechCrunch — June 11, 2013 acquisition announcement and reported price.
- The real story of how Facebook almost acquired Waze — Facebook negotiations, California relocation demand, and Google’s winning bid.