Google All Set To Acquire Waze For $1.3 Billion: 5 Facts About the Mapping Startup

Previously, there were reports that Google was in talks to Israeli mobile satellite navigation start-up Waze Inc. But, then there were lot of speculations about other competitors including Facebook, Apple, amongst others were also in talks to buy the unique GPS navigation software. All the confusions can be put aside, as it has been confirmed that Google will be acquiring Waze for $1.3 billion. The deal to be finalised in the coming days.

The Israeli-startup reportedly has around 50 million registered users, with 32 percent of them active. Waze is a community-driven application that learns from user's driving times to provide routing and real-time traffic updates. Additionally, people using the app can report accidents, traffic jams, speed traps, police and can update roads, landmarks, house numbers and so on. The award winning app has been noted for providing highly accurate map and traffic information. With the importance for mapping services becoming ever so prevalent, this acquisition must give Google Maps the edge over all it's competitors.

5 Facts About Waze

Fact 1: Waze Ltd. was founded in 2008 in Israel by Uri Levine, software engineer Ehud Shabtai, and Amir Shina

Fact 2: Waze won the Best Overall Mobile App award at the 2013 Mobile World Congress.

Fact 3: Waze holds patent for System and method for parking time estimations.

Fact 4: Waze is known to have supplied data for Apple's maps, before.

Fact 5: Facebook was in talks with Waze for potential acquisition at $1 billion. However, the social-networking site backed off from the deal.

Source: allthingsd