Waze is a one-of-a-kind GPS navigation service, in which some real time data depends on crowd sourced data from users all over the world using its app. Recently, Waze touted an impressive number of 50 million users on its service. It has been rumoured for quite some time that Waze has been on sale and many biggies like Facebook, Apple and Google were in talks to acquire the Israeli company. But if the recent reports from Israel are to be believed, Google has apparently won the race and is all prepared to buy Waze for a cool $1.3 Bn, which is more than what Facebook paid for Instagram.
The free GPS navigation service, which comes with turn by turn voice guidance has been always known for community contributed data like speed guns, real time traffic conditions and more. Available currently for Android and iOS, the company just recently launched a beta program for Windows Phone and if the reported deal goes through, it’s not hard to guess what might happen to the beta app. Google on the other hand, with its already robust Mapping and Navigation service, might just be happy to acquire more users for a crowd sourced data mining service. The service might help Google a lot, especially with real time traffic info.
Waze still has nothing to say yet about the reported deal, but our guess is we will see it soon enough.
Source Globes.il