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Our friends at Waze have come a long way since we first helped promote their alpha application back in May 2009. The app now has more than 50,000 downloads and has been helping commuters and road warriors dodge traffic, avoid speed traps, and navigate in real-time for almost a year. The app was formerly only available in the United States but today they announced its availability in both Germany and France.
Much like when it first launched in the United States, the German and French apps have some brushing up to do before they’re fully functional. Up until now Waze was using their app and user input to completely identify roads in these countries but have since merged their own findings with a complete database of roads from a 3rd party source. Users will still be able to contribute but this should greatly improve the accuracy and ability of the app for German and French users.
Starting today, French and German users will find that most roads will be marked with plenty of ‘road munching’ dots – GPS points that, when driven over, set the road’s direction, helping to increase map quality and navigability, while providing them with tons of extra points. The process of validation is incredibly quick – within just a couple of weeks, these maps will be fully navigable and highly accurate. We’ll also be adding candy and cupcake ‘road goodies’ – small icons worth 3 and 5 bonus points, respectively – to the map in areas where the system needs validation.
…And don’t forget the best part: waze’ll be distributing VIRTUAL TREASURE CHESTS (!) on the roads that, when driven over, have the potential to reward users with an Amazon gift card – so French and German wazers, get out there and find ‘em!
The treasure chest integration is great, but I’m hoping Waze doesn’t show the same treasure chests to every user – if Waze gains mass popularity it could cause some serious accidents itself! But hey, at least you would have Waze and know to avoid those accidents. There have been some pretty cool Waze success stories that make we want to give it another whirl – do you use Waze?
[Via Waze]
Waze is great, especially to us stuck on Android 1.5. I’ve been having a lot of fun trying to see how much data that I can add to the system.
FYI, in France to avoid “speed trap” you’d better use “ABE Radar” because it has qui see for details http://www.abonentendeur.com/
The spirit is realy ala CB ;-)
This has already save lots of my driving license points.
By the way, it would be cool if all the application federate their content. Ie, an POI created in one application can be displayed on another …
Something like a standard webservice for API could be created. Just an idea but would help people to get the radar POI I am pushing when using ABE on their iphone waze for instance. Let’s hoep the authors of the applications are reading these lines …
I could see this integrated with openstreetmap, that would be mighty cool. But hey maybe thats the source. Been using other mapping sources, and its funny how they manage to tell me a section of a road is highway when its closer to a residential road.