Example: Waze: GPS social-navigation application with real-time updates

 Waze

A tagline: summarize the app in one sentence

Is a GPS social-navigation application with real-time useful information for your path to the work or everywhere you usually go.

The problem the app solves

Besides the actual navegation service that it provides, it has the social interaction, and through this crowdsourcing, it gives you real time navegation advices, like traffic, police presence (interesting right?), accidents, important establishments like banks, restaurants, gas stations (with prices, distance and overall ratings). In other words, is the Facebook of the drivers.

Why I like this app

This app is very compelling because it offers the service of GPS navigation (the app is free), plus a lot more things. Social interaction, and thanks to that you can be aware of whats actually going on down the road, like an accident or very slow and dense traffic. You can make more efficient decisions out of it. Also you can choose to go to another gas station instead of the one you are about to see on the street (the apps can tell you the information about a lot of places like gas stations, banks, stores, hospitals,etc). It is always updating since every person that uses it, provides a bit of information to the system while driving and helps to improve the maps and so on.

Competing apps, and why this app is better

The apps that are in the similar department are: Google Maps Navigation, Nookia Maps, Orux Maps.  None of them have the social interaction, so that gives Waze and advantage. Althought all of them are for free. Orux, has the option to view your most used maps without the necesity to connect to internet. Although the only information that you could use is the maps, routes and basic information related to it.  Waze has a great deal of other intesting information like nearest important places like banks, gas stations; events or traffic flow; and share information with other people that use or don’t the same path that you do. Nokia is more interesting because you can get the climate of local zones, see buildings and maps in 3D, and offline maps. Finally Google maps is the most important since its supported by Google’s infrastructure, it offers satellite pictures from all over the world and it has the mode Google Street View too. Although Waze uses Bing to show the maps.

A little bit about how this app works

Waze is a free GPS navigation app for mobiles, that is supported by a wide and big community, which is updated all the time. From the maps, the routes, traffic flow, places of interest; to even get in touch with your friends or share important information between groups of local drivers (groups of people that share the same roads when driving regularly to school or work, etc.).