from Hacker News

Google set to acquire Waze for $1.3B

by calanya on 6/9/13, 2:48 PM with 59 comments

• by tyang on 6/9/13, 4:37 PM

  Great for me as a Google shareholder. Bad as an Angeleno fighting SoCal traffic.

  No GPS/maps system seems to offer the option for FasTrak or carpool lane.

  No GPS/maps system offers a way to tell a driver in a carpool lane if they have to change several lanes to the right to merge onto another freeway, or if there is a new carpool lane opening up to your left that takes you directly onto the next freeway you way to get on.

  This is what happens when you have an oligopoly (Garmin, Google/Waze, Apple) and everyone's product, design and sales people are in the Valley or Tel Aviv and not more driver-centric cities with much more traffic and orders of magnitude more route options like Los Angeles.

• by nlh on 6/9/13, 4:26 PM

  Interesting development (if it's true - as we all learn, deals have a way if changing a LOT at the last minute).

  I'd thought a FB acquisition would have been very important for FB -- it would have given them user-provided location info down to the foot for 50M people, which seems to me right up FB's alley (Where are you? Where are your friends? Where are you going? Where are they going?).

  For Google, this will obviously cement their domination in the mapping space. As it is, they're so vastly far ahead than others (I think I heard from a friend who works there that they have 10,000+ people on the Maps team worldwide?)

  Either way, Waze is awesome and despite the cynicism around what the big guys sometimes do, I can only imagine this making the app better and better.

• by vxNsr on 6/9/13, 4:32 PM

  NOOOOOOOOooooooooo!!!!

  This is a competitor to google's maps, the only thing they'd do is shut it down (or at least not make anymore updates, ah-la sparrow) and not integrate the ideas into Gmaps.

  From the founders standpoint this makes total sense, though, it's obvious this was the end game because they had no money-making business model.

• by beagle3 on 6/9/13, 3:31 PM

  Latest available source code is for v2.4 here http://www.waze.com/wiki/index.php/Source_code - newer versions are not free software.

  Map was never free data - I think they started with OSM, but later switched to a proprietary data source (and of course, they are crowdsourcing more data and updates from users)

• by badclient on 6/9/13, 7:47 PM

  Can someone with deep knowledge about Waze or the market explain why it would be worth $1.3B? It seems to have okay but far from insane traction. The technology seems less than trivial but at google scale shouldn't be that hard to develop in house. Once developed, it can simply be built into Google Maps and get overnight traction. As such, using Waze to me seems like a hack anyway.

• by Tloewald on 6/9/13, 3:51 PM

  Presumably this is defense against Apple (or Samsung) getting it.

• by laacz on 6/10/13, 6:02 AM

  As waze is not true competitor for google per se, I would be very dissapointed, if it would go the way other google-acquired software often goes - integration into google services and product's discontinuation.

  I do not believe (anymore) that google could acquire Waze and leave it as a standalone product. Which would mean lots of compromises in terms of community interaction because google has different approach to this than Waze does.

  Even more - waze approach to handling UGC in terms of map editing is somewhat not perfect, but with google involvement it could be discarded (not fixed), since it's not trivial to come up with better way.

  Google, i believe, is more interested in traffic data than in community map editing, but latter one gives Waze lots of its appeal.

• by atirip on 6/9/13, 5:15 PM

  For me the most interesting in this case is why nobody else wasn't interested enough, 1.3B is not that much of a money for other possible acquiree candidates to withdraw.

• by techaddict009 on 6/9/13, 6:26 PM

  Now this is really an interesting news. First facebook was trying hard to acquire it (http://mashable.com/2013/05/09/facebook-waze-1-billion/) and now google is all set to acquire it. Hope whosoever acquires it makes better use of it.

• by arindone on 6/9/13, 11:45 PM

  I'm surprised not many people are pointing out the antitrust concerns here...There are a few competitors in the space, but there may be a strong case that Google is essentially buying out that Waze's capabilities and niche are only rivaled by that of Google.

• by slacka on 6/9/13, 5:42 PM

  I love the idea of crowdsourcing your speed to generate real-time traffic information. The other crowdsourcing features this brings don't seem very useful to me. Also, not sure this is worth $1.3B. Seems like another groupon or summly.

• by danielcampos93 on 6/10/13, 12:34 AM

  I would be very curious to see what google does with waze an integrating it to maps. I think it would have been much more interesting to see what Facebook would have done with it

• by salimmadjd on 6/9/13, 3:47 PM

  What I trust even less than NSA and US intelligence is Israel's. We will have even less control on which entity or agency will have access to, what places or whom I'm visiting.