Waze 3.9 update introduces Places feature, allows users to edit business and residential information
It was only a few months ago the folks at Waze introduced the 3.8 update allowing users to easily keep up with friends on-the-go. It was a useful feature that further solidified Waze as one of the true “social traffic and maps” service they’ve been touting for years. Today, the app is seeing yet another update to version 3.9 (Android 4.0+) and introduces a nifty new feature dubbed “Places.”
Traveling to a location you’re not entirely sure is the correct place is never fun. With Waze 3.9, preview information on your destination will be shown to you when you plug an address into Waze’s navigation. This will help ensure you’re traveling to the right spot before you actually get there. Where is this information coming from? Well, from you.
Located in the Report menu, Places allows users to edit normally inaccurate or incomplete information on businesses or residential locations. Everything from whether the place has parking (and where it’s located) or a drive-thru, to adding an exterior photo that will be displayed for other Wazers when they arrive at said location. Speaking of parking, Waze will now save your parking spot for you automatically, a feature we recently saw introduced in Google Now not too long ago.
Here’s how it works. Once a Wazer has arrived at a destination, they can then add a photo or edit information on a businesses. Because Waze’s huge community will all be contributing (theoretically, that is), it doesn’t matter if you add a lot or little info — someone else will likely fill in the rest for you later.
To help incentivize the adding of Places, Waze will be paying out major points bonuses if you’re into that sorta thing. Of course, since Waze crowd sources all its data from their users, you can sleep well at night knowing you’ve made the world a little less frustrating for drivers (while essentially doing a lot of Google’s work for them).
Oh, and Waze also mentions search autocomplete now works everywhere in the world and they’ve also managed to squash a few bugs in the new update. For a quick overview on what’s new, check out Waze’s newly uploaded YouTube vid below.