Talks of Waze being bought out have been circling for several months now, with companies like Facebook and Apple having reportedly been in discussion to buy the social mapping company. Now, however, this speculation can be put to rest as Google has officially sealed the deal on the company, a deal rumored to be worth roughly $1.3 billion.
Google announced the news earlier today from its official company blog. “To help you outsmart traffic, today we’re excited to announce we’ve closed the acquisition of Waze. This fast-growing community of traffic-obsessed drivers is working together to find the best routes from home to work, every day.”
Google states the the Waze team will remain independant and will continue to work in Israel for the time being. It also added that some of its features will be making their way to Google Maps. “We’re excited about the prospect of enhancing Google Maps with some of the traffic update features provided by Waze and enhancing Waze with Google’s search capabilities.”
Waze was started four years ago, and since then, has managed to rack up over 47 million users. It will be interesting to see how Google chooses to use the massive amounts of community data it has collected.
