Waze is a great app that runs on the great idea of crowdsourcing map creation, updates, and traffic status. Every user contributes variables like their location and speed, and can proactively report accidents or other traffic issues. The data is sent to the server where it is processed and used to optimize user routes, making driving experiences better for everyone involved. You contribute your share to the community and you get valuable information in return.
Waze also utilizes a gamification model that rewards users with points and badges for desired behaviors like reporting road hazards and allows users to thank one another for their reports. Personally, I don’t give a damn about the points and badges—I’ve been a Waze user for years, and they never meant anything tangible to me. The thanking mechanism is nice, however, because it provides feedback that my reports were beneficial to others, which encourages me to contribute my share and report next time.
Waze is the world’s largest community-based traffic and navigation app which enables drivers to share real-time traffic and road info, saving other local drivers time and gas money on their commute. Like other GPS software, it learns from users’ driving times to provide routing and real-time traffic updates. What distinguishes Waze, however, is that its users can report accidents, traffic jams, speed and police traps, and from the online map editor, can update roads, landmarks, house numbers, etc. Hence, the real value that Waze creates (over and above other mapping software such as Google Maps) is by crowd-sourcing and leveraging its users’ actions on the app.
Waze is a typical network-based business with strong direct network effects that are local in nature. As more users join the platform, more users become available to provide Waze with the value-creating information, making the app more valuable and compelling for existing users to use and new users to download.Most crowd-sourcing business models face issues with incentivizing participation and managing the crowd on their platform. Waze incentivizes user engagement via gamification techniques. To quote the Waze co-founder Di-Ann Eisnor, “The first [step] was making it fun for people to create roads and get points and those early adopters were really into helping people.” This also helped Waze overcome the classic chicken-and-egg problem which most network-based businesses face: Acquiring a critical mass of users that can make the platform useful.
Waze’s value creation is fairly straightforward to understand: Waze helps de-congest traffic, which in addition to having a positive environmental impact, saves drivers fuel and time that would otherwise have been spent on the road during peak traffic hours. The key is that this value creation happens through the crowd: This is something that a piece of software would not be able to do as well. E.g., Software would not be able to interpret special situations such as accidents, traffic re-routing by police, etc. as well as humans can. Hence, this crowd-sourced model can potentially help unlock greater value for other technologies such as driverless cars – potentially, one of the important reasons for Google’s acquisition of Waze.
Waze is free to download and use for consumers. The value is captured via advertisers. Waze offers resellers and advertisers a web interface to advertise based on locations: Small ad-icons appear on the Waze maps for an interested Wazer to engage with. In addition, Waze offers TV news stations a web interface to broadcast current traffic reports and alerts directly from the Waze app; the service has already been used by 25 TV U.S. news stations. Location based advertising is one of the hottest things in advertising currently, demanding premium click-through rates. Given this, the monetization and growth potential of Waze’s business model is huge.
A potential concern that has commonly been voiced about Waze is that the prospect of more drivers using Waze has the potential to distract them with a flurry of icons and notifications and put them at greater risk of an accident. Such road-safety issues, if proven, would be an example of a negative network effect that platforms face, when the network becomes larger than the optimal size. These issues are, however, easy to resolve via minor tweaks in the product, such as showing only the top X most relevant icons per unit area on the Waze map.
It seems obvious that after being taken over by Google, Waze is trying to move from being a crowdsourcing app to being a social network. I think this move finds Waze driving on the wrong route of “What can users do for me?” instead of staying on “What can I do for users?” boulevard—a sad change in direction for an app with so much to offer.
How Waze uses crowdsourcing for better traffic data
References:
Shay Ben-Barak, October 15, 2014, Crowdsourcing Is Social, but Does Not a Social Network Make: A Waze review
Shay Ben-Barak, October 15, 2014, Crowdsourcing Is Social, but Does Not a Social Network Make: A Waze review
S, December 6, 2015, Waze – Crowdsourcing Maps and Traffic Information
I've been a Waze user for years as well and I can also say that I don't care about the points and candy either. I've been fascinated by the ability to use other users generated data so that I can get to work faster. Google actually purchased Waze and has integrated some of the technology into Google Maps but the two will always remain separate as they really are two separate target audiences. One thing I love above the crowdsourcing in Waze is that it's real-time and has been very accurate in directing and re-directing my route based on user reports and the internal GPS tracking speed. I don't always use a navigation system but when I do, it's Waze.
ReplyDeleteAgree. Waze is just awesome.
DeleteThis is the first time I have heard about Waze! I would say it is extremely one of the most important apps that rely on crowdsourcing to become very beneficial.
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DeleteWaze is a great navigation app.
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