A Waze to Go
Gosh, I’m punny. But seriously, sure, GPS is a useful tool for getting where you want to go when you don’t know how to get there. But have you ever followed your GPS’s route and ended up in a quagmire of a traffic jam.
Something new and better is on the way. Introducing Waze, “a social mobile application providing free turn-by-turn navigation based on the live conditions of the road. 100% powered by users, the more you drive, the better it gets. Join the community of drivers in your area today!
Have a windows mobile or symbian smartphone? Want to help us build the first driver-generated dynamic map? We’re seeking a group of enthusiastic users to participate in the very, very early stages of the waze project.
Do you enjoy playing a key role in early building of community-based products? Do you like finding bugs & errors, providing feedback on functionality and helping overcome all kinds of teething challenges? If this sounds like you, then come join in and help us to make waze the very best it can be!
You can register with any phone WM or Symbian phone, including: HTC Touch Diamond, HTC Touch Diamond 2, HTC Fuze (Touch Pro), Smasung Omnia HD, HTC Tilt, Samsung Jack, Nokia E71x, Nokia N95 and more.”
Check out their guided tour on their home page. Very fun and useful stuff.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
Doug “Very, very early stages” indeed, proof-of-concept stage judging by the slow collection of live traffic data throughout the country. That said, this would be very useful if a lot of people used it. I’ve wondered why Google doesn’t do this in their own traffic data — though maybe they do. I don’t know how they aggregate that information. But offering everyone with gmm to participate in a Latitude-like dump of their location for Google to use in its traffic data, that would hit the spot.
Maybe they’re hoping someone like Google or TomTom will buy them. By the way anyone here ever use TomTom Traffic? Does it work at all like this Waze system?
Signed up for the alpha. Good catch, Doc.
Doug
Doug Are you thinking of Google Latitude”? That lets you send Google your position including cell tower location both running the program or letting it run in the background to Google so that other Latitude buddies you make may view your location and you can view theirs. So they do have the same thing more or less but they apply it to another purpose, sharing the data with people you specify only.
Opening it up to a traffic collection utility for Google like this Waze thing may not add much more than their existing traffic system to justify privacy concerns it would raise, bandwidth it would consume and additional power it would drain from the phones to send and receive such data. Also they may collect their traffic data, which they do just fine for major roads and even some streets in my city, from other methods that don’t rely on cars with someone inside using their software on his phone. But I don’t know how the likes of Google and TomTom collect their traffic data. I can imagine a lot of ways, just don’t know which.
larry Yes, they recently started using Latitude data to greatly expand their traffic coverage.
http://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobile-phones/google-uses-your-mobile-to-end-traffic-jams-629554
Doug Waze now available for WinMo, http://waze.s3.amazonaws.com/client/usa/waze.cab which is an alpha version, 1.2.4 as of 9/25/09, open to the public (not just people who registered for the alpha). Does 3D, didn’t know that. The coverage is a lot less scarce than when the good Doctor posted this, but still pretty thin but that’s what we the community are for. To give you an idea of the flow of live data, here’s their live map thingy on their website: http://www.waze.com/livemap/.
If that download link is dead or you want a shorter address, http://m.waze.com and click on the touch screen download even though you may have a keyboard.
Doug
WM not yet available. Had to signup for alpha.