Tuesday, December 1. 2009

Waze Partner Program: Q & A with CEO

The PR is quite vague, but the basics seem to be:

The partnership program forms a mutually beneficial relationship in which waze and its users are provided with a base map for accelerating community growth, while the partner benefits include turning their map from a static and costly-to-update resource, into a real-time, navigable asset with significantly lower operational costs. Partners also expand their data set to include real-time traffic, community updates and reports.

The official announcement will be at the Navigation & Location USA event today and tomorrow.

Here's a Q & A with answers from CEO Noam Bardin.

What type of partners is waze looking for? Those with data? Those with apps running on other datasets?

The partner program is aimed at data providers - primarily map providers. It is open to map providers of different levels (display, navigable, out-of-date, governmental) and, at its core, will take this data and return it updated and expanded. Updated to navigable information, new segments, missing data (such as street names or missing streets) fixes to geometry etc and expanded to include real time traffic and community alerts.

Are there any monetary benefits for partners?

This partnerships is a partnership and not a data buy. By sharing together data, the partner gets the benefit of crowdsourcing and the community gets the benefit of a more mature map. Both parties can share in the revenue from selling the data, regardless of who sells it (the partner or Waze) so it is a win-win for both sides of the partnership.

Are there restrictions on data use? What's the license for partners using waze data?

This is confidential but beneficial to both parties. Fundamentally - the program is geared towards licensed data providers.

Is there an API to use to access the waze data?

There are a variety of client and server side API's being released to enable the data to be easily integrated into applications and web sites.

Will partners be providing data in raw form to waze? How will that work? What's the time frame to add a new dataset from a local provider?

The data is provided in raw form and made available back in the same format or in processed format through API's/

Is this part of the move to add OSM data to waze's dataset? [Background: Di-Ann Eisnor, Waze's community geographer, explained at the Location Intelligence Conference that the company was interested in using OSM data and was waiting for that project to have a license that would allow that.]

This is not OSM related as we are partnering with data providers who own there own data set and can license it accordingly for commercial use. OSM data restricts from commercializing the data and so would not be part of the partner program. We think what they are doing is great for the industry as a whole but for this specific program, it isn't relevant.