#1312 2008 · Waze (Ehud Shabtai, Uri Levine, Amir Shinar) · Navigation / mobile software
Waze couldn't afford a licensed map, so it had drivers draw one just by driving to work
问题
A startup couldn't afford to license or survey the accurate, constantly updated road and traffic data drivers needed
背景
Commercial digital maps in the mid-2000s were licensed at prices only large companies could afford, and even licensed maps went stale as roads changed, leaving out the real-time congestion, accidents, and closures drivers actually needed to know about. Ehud Shabtai, frustrated with the inaccurate GPS software on the market, started building his own mapping project, FreeMap Israel, in 2006 — but building and maintaining a usable, current road map from scratch through paid surveying was exactly the cost problem the project couldn't get around.
The team's answer was to stop trying to build the map directly and instead capture it as a byproduct of something drivers were already doing for free: driving. The app tracked a phone's GPS trace as its owner drove to wherever they were already headed, automatically inferring and drawing roads from the accumulated traces, while a companion editing tool let volunteers refine and correct the resulting map by hand in their own time.
换别人会怎么做
The available options were licensing map data from an established commercial provider at a cost the young company couldn't sustain, or hiring surveyors to independently build and continuously update road and traffic data, both requiring capital the startup didn't have.
他们看到了什么
Shabtai's team saw a map is really a record of roads people travel, and drivers were already generating that record every trip. The map could be captured as a free byproduct of navigation instead of surveyed separately.
那一手
Waze's app silently recorded anonymized GPS traces from ordinary drivers going about their normal trips, using the aggregated traces to draw and continuously update road maps at effectively zero marginal cost, while a ranked volunteer community of map editors — organized into tiers with titles like Local Champs and coordinated 'MapRaids' — manually corrected and filled in gaps the raw driving data missed.
为什么管用
Because the map data came from GPS traces generated during trips drivers were making anyway, the marginal cost of expanding coverage was close to zero and scaled automatically with adoption — more users meant more traces meant a better map, which in turn attracted more users. Layering a ranked, gamified volunteer editing community on top let humans correct the gaps and errors pure trace data couldn't resolve on its own, without Waze needing to employ a mapping staff to do it.
值了多少
By 2021 Waze had over 50,000 volunteer map editors making 18 million monthly edits across more than 185 countries.
什么时候会失灵
The mechanism depends on a large enough active user base generating traces before the map is useful enough to attract that user base in the first place, a cold-start problem that requires some other draw to bootstrap early adoption in each new region, and it depends on being able to filter or verify crowd-submitted data cheaply enough to prevent manipulation; a product with too few users, or data too easy to spoof, can't rely on incidental usage alone to build something trustworthy.
后来呢
Waze's crowd-driving and volunteer-editing model let it build and maintain a live, constantly-updated global road and traffic map without ever paying for the surveying that competitors relied on licensed data providers to do, and the approach was validated commercially when Google acquired Waze in 2013.
资料来源
- [1]A Living History of the Waze MapWaze (Medium), 2021medium.com