"The only Waze is ethics"
Thank you for that. First smile on an otherwise dull afternoon.
Google's acquisition of free map app Waze has awoken Britain's competition watchdog, which today confirmed it was scrutinising the gobble. Israeli firm Waze Mobile was bought by Google in June this year for a rumoured $1bn. It gave the advertising goliath satnav-like software that, we're told, taps into the whereabouts of 50 …
No one is forced to use Waze, there are alternatives, some are free and some are not.
Also 50 Million is actually quite a small segment of the market, waze has no monopoly and even the product itself is in a niche market.
I do not know about anyone else but I personally use Waze for the Radar information, for which I can no longer "legally" use any of the alternatives on the market. ( French law sucks on this point).
I am sure that if someone had a better product, for the same price, then I would use it but at the moment there isn't. I have also have paid for mapping/routing software but it does not supply the radar alerts so I use Waze.....
Besides the Radar part the rest of the program is a bit "childish" and I have difficulty seeing how they are creating any kind of monopoly.
Its probably the fact that Google are already integrating it into Google Maps making it one product.
I'm on the fence about this on the one hand you technically have a near worlwide SatNav with street view and up to date traffic information. On the other hand this merger would create a monopoly as no other product does or could offer this level of integration for free and when a monopoly rises innovation dies.
This post has been deleted by its author
Apparently Ads have been around in Waze for quite a while before Google got involved but the Nissan ads have only been seen in the UK for a few weeks. I'm guessing it was part of the strategy to sell the company and prove a revenue stream.
Seem a bit pointless to me as I'm not going to suddenly drive to Nissan because of a pop-up but as 0.001% of people respond to spam you never know.
First - Google were already collecting real-time road information from anyone running Google Maps - how else do you think they provided the traffic overlay for the last several years?
Second - TomTom are still a big competitor in the UK - and also collect the whereabouts, speed and direction of every TomTom user (who runs a TomTom unit with the traffic subscription via Sim Card)