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At a session titled “Waze Under the Hood” at the Second Jerusalem Tourism Summit at Binyanei Ha’Uma, Waze gps navigation app co-founder Uri Levine delivered a presentation detailing the history of the company and his vision for its future. Being an extremely popular navigation and mapping application, Waze is unique in the sense that it’s real-time traffic and map information is crowd-sourced, giving it the added benefit of being one of the few companies that actually owns its map data.

The presentation was followed by a Q&A session, which included topics pertaining to Waze such as law enforcement, traffic analysis, dynamic map development, business models, motorcycle support, the first mappers, navigation errors, school bus route planning, tourism application, and search improvement.

When asked about recent media rumors about a possible acquisition by giants such as Google and Facebook, Levine declined to comment, stating that “Newspaper[s] have sold us six or seven times in the last six month[s] or so, and we are still here… …newspapers are not the buyers.” He also lamented the closing of electric car start-up Better Place.

Credits: Kuvien Images

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