Waze Partners with Intermap

Waze.com is a crowd-sourced traffic information provider.They just formed a partnership with Intermap Technologies: "Through ongoing analysis, Intermap can supplement its existing road change detection process, noting when new roads appear or existing roads change. Combining the Waze data with satellite imagery analysis, the Company will enhance its change detection capability and be enabled to pinpoint where additional technologies can be utilized to capture new and altered roads." Crowd-sourced traffic data could present a great opportunity for local media to offer surface street traffic data.

'Traffic' Opportunity for Local Media

If you are in local media, you may want to talk to the folks at Waze.com. They need you and you could use them. They are developing their own maps from older census maps. They are verifying/updating their map by rewarding people for driving on roads. As people drive a road waze gets (1) validation the road exists, (2) gets traffic flow data (3) gets incident reports.

They need a media partner to help increase adoption. Media could benefit from working with them because they can drive engagement in the traffic product/section and create revenue opportunities.

Regarding engagement, viewers could be encouraged to participate in the reporting of incidents and the ability to ask other users (via an instant msg interface) what traffic to expect ahead. Media could reward some viewers by making them "traffic reporters/spotters" who's
updates auto post to the maps via apps and Wap decks.

As revenue goes, they can place advertisers such as Domino's pizza locations on maps. They can ads including the ability to reward people who visit a Domino's (verified via GPS) with a coupon.

Keep in mind, their data is crowd sourced and not very deep, yet. That's why they need help. So, the best use of their data would be as a supplement, or overlay one "professional data" on a mash up, such as Google traffic data.