The UK Office of Fair Trading and the Israel Antitrust Authority are also investigating. As of October 2013 the FTC has decided that it will not be challenging Google's acquisition of Waze. In June 2013 the United States Federal Trade Commission started considering whether Google's purchase of Waze might violate competition law-Waze was one of very few competitors in the mobile mapping sector, to Google's other property Google Maps.
In June 2013 Google bought Waze for $1.1 billion, adding a social data aspect to its mapping business. In 2011, the company, which planned to monetize through location based advertising and to expand into Asia, raised an additional $30 million in financing.įacebook and other companies were interested in purchasing Waze, but did not reach an agreement. In 2010, the company raised $25 million in the second round of funding. In December 2011, Waze employed 80 people, composed of 70 at Ra'anana, Israel and 10 in Palo Alto, California. The company was originally called LinQmap. was founded in 2008 in Israel by Uri Levine, software engineer Ehud Shabtai, and Amir Shinar. As older platforms (Symbian, WM, Blackberry) do not support either a full native UI or other APIs they rely on, they could not support them, although existing versions would continue to work. In July 2013 Waze said that they were planning to support both iPhone and Android, and would consider supporting new platforms. Waze supports Android, iPhone, Symbian, Blackberry 10 (except Blackberry Q10), Windows Phone 8 and Windows Mobile from version 5. 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. On June 11, 2013, Google completed the acquisition of Waze for a reported US$1.3 billion. Waze won the Best Overall Mobile App award at the 2013 Mobile World Congress, beating Dropbox, Flipboard and others. It was developed by the Israeli start-up Waze Mobile, which was acquired by Google in 2013. Waze is a GPS-based geographical navigation application program for smartphones 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 the mobile telephone network.
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