What is "waze"

Waze , formerly "Freemap", is a GPS-based geographical navigation application program for smartphones and tablets with GPS support and display screens which provides turn-by-turn information and user-submitted travel times and route details, downloading location-dependent information over mobile networks. Waze was developed in Israel by the startup company "Waze Mobile", funded by early-stage American venture capital firm Bluerun Ventures, and was acquired by Google in 2013.

Waze won the Best Overall Mobile App award at the 2013 Mobile World Congress, beating Dropbox, Flipboard and others. On June 11, 2013, Google completed the acquisition of Waze for a reported US$1.3 billion. As part of the deal signed, each of Waze's 100 employees will receive an average of about $1.2 million, which represents the largest payout to employees in the history of Israeli high tech.

Waze supports Android, iPhone, Symbian, BlackBerry 10 (except BlackBerry Q10), Windows Phone 8 and Windows Mobile from version 5. In July 2013 Waze said they planned to support both iPhone and Android, and would consider supporting new platforms. As older platforms (Symbian, WM, BlackBerry) do not support either a full native UI or other application programming interfaces they rely on, they could not support them, although existing versions would continue to work.