Why Waze Is Worth More Than $1 Billion ⇥ theatlanticwire.com

Rebecca Greenfield, the Atlantic Wire:

Waze did something very smart from the perspective of companies trying to make money off our data: It normalized giving away our privacy. In order to run — in order to be as useful as it is — the maps app needs users giving up as much of their driving and location data as possible. You know, in order to properly crowd-source road conditions.

Is it just me, or are billion-dollar valuations being thrown around like crazy in the past year or so? You can bet Apple wants this, but you can also bet that they do not want Google to have this — Apple already licenses some map data from Waze, and they don’t want to (once again) deal with Google to license it.