Google Bought Waze For $966 Million

It was in June last month that we heard about how Google has picked up Waze, first in principle, before the deal was finalized shortly afterwards. The thing is, no exact figure for the acquisition was reported, although somewhere slightly north of $1 billion is not too far off the mark back then. Well, fast forward by slightly more than a month, and we have regulatory documents that were filed on Thursday show that Google has paid $966 million to purchase online mapping service Waze.

Waze is seen to be a strategic acquisition for Google, as it delivers a mapping app which relies on crowdsourcing in order to attain real-time information on traffic. Granted, you cannot please every single person all the time, and there are bound to be moments when Waze fails you miserably, but overall, the barometer of user happiness with Waze has been pretty satisfactory so far. Right now, Waze still remains as a free download on Android, iOS, Windows Phone, and Symbian, not to mention that it is in beta for BlackBerry, too.

Edwin Kee
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: Google, Waze