By Matthew Lynley
Call it the Tim Cook effect.
IPhone map app start-up Waze got a huge boost today, thanks to a shout-out by Apple CEO Tim Cook in his letter apologizing for Apple’s new, and widely-panned, iPhone Maps application.
After publicly apologizing for Apple’s widely-panned new iPhone Maps application, CEO Tim Cook rattled off a list of alternative maps apps, including Google's Web-based map. Among them was Waze.
Apple also added a new featured section in the App Store pointing to alternatives to the new iPhone Maps application. Thanks to that push, Waze saw about a 40% bump in its downloads across the board today compared to its average downloads, CEO Noam Bardin told Digits.
Its downloads were also up following the launch of iOS 6, the newest iPhone operating system that included the new Apple Maps application. Waze has seen a 60% increase on daily downloads in the U.S. since the latest version of the iPhone operating system launched with Apple’s new maps app, a Waze spokesperson said.
Waze is a start-up that collects map data from all its users, who can report traffic incidents and delays. It then gives directions based on that data, which is collected in real time, to find the fastest driving route. The more users contributing data, the more accurate the map â€" and Waze has 26 million users.
We talked with Mr. Bardin to find out more about what’s happened to the app since Apple’s Maps fiasco began. Here’s an edited version of the interview:
Can you give me a bit of an update to what’s going on with Waze? Start from the beginning.
Noam Bardin: Waze began in 2006 as an open source project by one of the founders in Israel. He got a cease and desist letter from a map company. He had a meeting with them, where they offered to buy his company, but weren’t backing down. This is what map companies are like, they hold the data. It takes years and years to build a strong map database, and up to 2009 it was a duopoly.
Waze began democratizing maps and started building a new map with data from users. In the beginning of 2008 they raised money and launched the company. Fast forward today, we’re in 45 countries. In any country you can imagine, there are people building Waze maps.
How does Waze differ compared to, say, Google’s maps?
Noam Bardin: Unlike traditional navigation clients, ours is geared toward everyday driving. People use our apps differently than the phone map, which is about finding things locally. We’re about finding a route. Tens of thousands of people come online to contribute to our maps, as with Wikipedia, and we built our own infrastructure. When you think about what makes Waze different from MapQuest, if you look at who owns their own data, who’s built their own map, there’s some traditional players. Then there’s Google, which went out two years ago and poured unlimited money into it, into street cars and the like to map the world.
Then there’s Waze. We haven’t spent billions of dollars a year, we’ve cooperated with millions of users. Google is the number one player, but a few years out there’s no excuse that we wouldn’t pass them. Think like Wikipedia. Users used Wikipedia and it beat Britannica in the end. The other players aren’t pouring unlimited money into their apps. They’re under a lot of stress. Google is still investing unlimited amounts of money â€" we’re just finding users to do that, that’s why we can have maps being built in a ton of countries without having to have the financial expenditure.
If you’re Google and you can pour in enough money, you can build whatever quality maps you want. But you have to invest every year over and over again. It’s not about fixing the bugs. You have to index it every day, every hour, every second, and you have to be first one to have new data. We can rebuild our map every 24 hours (with data from our users). Traditional players do it every quarter or year. If you live in Minnesota, you have to wait until Minnesota is important enough for one of the traditional ones.
How do you think Apple handled this latest PR crisis?
Noam Bardin: I think Apple has handled this crisis really well. This is gonna be a business case study, it’s phenomenal. Forget why it happened. They came out and apologized and promoted third party apps, I’ve never seen any company in the tech space work so well with the users. I think it’s phenomenal. The fact that they are actually promoting apps that compete with their core apps, it’s a moment for Tim Cook.
What were some of the challenges Apple faced? Why do you think there was so much criticism?
Noam Bardin: They’re gonna be fixing the problems really fast. The expectation was set so high there was no way they could have lived up. Even if they launched maps that were 100% comparable with Google, they still wouldn’t live up to expectations. Apple created its own challenge by hyping up maps so much and then trying to compete with the best mapping company, Google, head-to-head. People were so used to Google. Apple has to chase the quality of Google and they have to get better than Google.
Did you guys get a nice bump from Tim Cook’s comments?
Noam Bardin: We saw about a 20% bump in downloads when iOS 6 came out. Today, it’s just out of control. We’re going to break every download record today. So far, we’re up up about 40% for a regular day.
Did Apple tell you that your app would be featured?
Noam Bardin: We had no idea. Nobody asked us anything, nobody reached out to us. It’s Apple, they’re not gonna tell anything to anyone. But it’s great, not just the apologizing, but they created a category and featured this category. Launching a maps app in a half-baked way, that was a questionable decision. But making up for that so fast and making a category, it’s great.
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