After a few short days rumors, it has finally happened. Google has acquired the traffic-mapping, navigation service: Waze for a reported $1.3 billion. For those of you who may have never heard of the app, Waze gives you turn-by-turn navigation but the key differences between this app and other mapping solutions is that you had a community of over 30 million users updating maps of traffic incidents in real-time.
This was a great lifesaver after Apple unveiled the not-so-good Maps and served as great alternative until Google Maps came to iOS. While Google plans to keep the company separate for now, they will utilize Waze’s traffic update features to Google Maps and bring Google’s search capabilities to Waze. Facebook was allegedly in the running to buy Waze but somewhere along the lines, the deal fell through. Congrats Waze team!
