Waze

Waze Mobile Ltd, ( ; ) doing business as Waze ( ), formerly FreeMap Israel, is a subsidiary company of Google that provides satellite navigation software on smartphones and other computers that support the Global Positioning System (GPS). In addition to turn-by-turn navigation, it incorporates user-submitted travel times and route details while downloading location-dependent information over a cellular network. Waze describes its application as a community-driven initiative that is free to download and use. The software was originally developed in Israel by Waze Mobile, a company founded by Israeli entrepreneurs Ehud Shabtai, Amir Shinar, and Uri Levine, who are also veterans of Unit 8200. Funding for the initial project was provided by two Israeli venture capital firms, Magma and Vertex Ventures Israel, as well as by an early-stage American venture capital firm, Bluerun Ventures. In June 2013, Waze Mobile was acquired by Google for US$1.3 billion. The application generates revenue through hyperlocal advertising to an estimated 130 million users.

Waze Mobile Ltd, ( ; ) doing business as Waze ( ), formerly FreeMap Israel, is a subsidiary company of Google that provides satellite navigation software on smartphones and other computers that support the Global Positioning System (GPS). In addition to turn-by-turn navigation, it incorporates user-submitted travel times and route details while downloading location-dependent information over a cellular network. Waze describes its application as a community-driven initiative that is free to download and use. The software was originally developed in Israel by Waze Mobile, a company founded by Israeli entrepreneurs Ehud Shabtai, Amir Shinar, and Uri Levine, who are also veterans of Unit 8200. Funding for the initial project was provided by two Israeli venture capital firms, Magma and Vertex Ventures Israel, as well as by an early-stage American venture capital firm, Bluerun Ventures. In June 2013, Waze Mobile was acquired by Google for US$1.3 billion. The application generates revenue through hyperlocal advertising to an estimated 130 million users. ===Development=== In 2006, Israeli programmer Ehud Shabtai founded a community project known as FreeMap Israel, which aimed to create (with the crowd-sourcing assistance of community users) a free digital mapping database of Israel compiled in the Hebrew language with ensured free content, updates, and distribution. In 2008, Shabtai formed a company called Waze to commercialize the initial project; in 2009¹, it was renamed to Waze Mobile Ltd. and gave birth to its tagline "Outsmarting Traffic, Together." coined by the company's first in-house communications hire, Michal Habdank-Kolaczkowski. In 2010, the company raised US$25 million in the second round of funding; an additional $30 million was raised in financing in the following year. The application was updated in 2011 to display real-time, community-curated points of interest, including local events such as street fairs and protests. By December 2011, Waze had employed 80 people, 70 of whom were based in Ra'anana, Israel, with the remaining 10 based in Palo Alto, United States. In November 2012, the company began to monetize its application, offering resellers and advertisers a web interface to advertise based on location, where a small icon appears when a phone is at a particular location, prompting the user to engage. It also offers television news stations a web interface to broadcast current traffic reports and alerts directly from the Waze application; the service had been in use by 25 American television news stations by June 2013. It has also been used in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, inside Rio's Operations Center since July 24, 2013, as well as in the American states of New York and New Jersey since 2012. In 2013, the GSM Association, a trade association of mobile network operators, gave Waze the Best Overall Mobile App award at the association's Mobile World Congress exhibition. ==Licensing== Waze Mobile Ltd holds several patents. The Waze v2.x software was distributed under GNU General Public License v2, which did not extend to map data. The base map data initially came from US Census Bureau TIGER data. FreeMap data was not published under open content licenses even before the shift to the Waze project. Ehud Shabtai, who initiated and developed Freemap and Waze, consistently insisted on crowdsourced data without using external sources or projects like OpenStreetMap that would restrict the commercialization of Waze map data. Starting with Waze v3, the application was rewritten and switched to a proprietary license. The last open-source client version for the iPhone and Android was 2.4.0.0, and for Windows Mobile 2.0. A class action suit was filed in March 2014 by accountant Roey Gorodish against Waze, claiming intellectual property violation for the use of open-source FreeMap map and code from the open-source RoadMap software, a project that Ehud Shabtai had contributed for the Windows PocketPC version in 2006. The lawsuit was dismissed on March 5, 2017, with a clear-cut decision that there was no basis for a class action suit in this case. The lawsuit was dismissed again, with the Israeli Supreme Court issuing a final verdict on 28 January 2019. ==References==

Text derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1376136192 under CC BY-SA 4.0; modifications have been made.