Waze: Make Your Own Maps in Realtime

Leo en Waze: Make Your Own Maps in Realtime: una aplicación bien interesante de los sensores que tienen los telefonos. Pensar una computadora, formada por un gran cerebro central, y usar telefonos celulares con sensores de posición y agregandole algunos sensores mas (por ejemplo de temperatura, de temblores, de presion, etc) a los que hoy ya tienen (como son las camaras y la posibilidad de mensajes) va habilitar una cantidad de aplicaciones muy interesantes. Por ejemplo para mejorar los pronosticos de tormentas, de tornados y muchas otras cosas.

Waze (blog) is using mobile phones as sensors to collect data. The Israeli-based start-up (though now with offices in SF) is relying on users to create its maps, to report realtime traffic and to teach it how to route from place A to place B. Along their drives the user gobbles points for every action. Use the app and gain recognition within the Waze community. The company is doing all of this through its free turn-by-turn navigation apps (sorry, iPhone and Android only for now). This is exactly what I've expected to see from the Tele Atlas/Tomtom and NAVTEQ/Nokia acquisitions, but that hasn't happened yet in either case.

So far there have been over 4,000 installs on Android and 15,000 on the iPhone (it amazingly took them just 7(!) days to get approved by the App Store). If you want to install the app on your Android phone just scan this QR Code and you'll be taken directly to it on the Android Market. They will be adding voice directions to the apps shortly.

Here are some iPhone screenshots. Driving screen:

Reporting an incident:

All of the incident options: