Using the waze desktop maps
There is a new social mobile application on the block – waze.com.
You can download the application onto your smartphone (Apple, Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian at the moment, Blackberry is coming shortly) and use the free software as an on-board turn-by-turn navigation system.
The maps are produced and updated by the waze community – it simply involves driving around with waze running on your mobile phone – and the more people doing that, the better the quality of the maps becomes.
The waze turn-by-turn navigation screen on an iPhone
You can add information such as where the speed traps in your area are. See the user manual here for more information. You can even show temporary blockages, such as accidents. These and the location of other waze users who are driving around are shown on the navigation screen.
Waze started in Israel and only arrived in Germany and France via the USA on 11th March 2010, so there is still quite a bit to do. Waze has set up an initial country-wide map of Germany based on data from Intermap, and at the moment users are confirming the Intermap street data by driving over the roads. There are not many waze users in Germany so you can help by joining in, confirming and correcting roads (there is one error on the little area of Schmitten shown in the top screen shot above that I need to correct) and also adding PIOs and house numbers to make the maps more useful. there is a small German language waze user-forum active here.
If you are the first to confirm a piece of road, the symbol for your vehicle changes to become a little pac-man gobbling up the virgin road!
(If you see a user called “sqeze” moving on the maps, that’s me 
– see you on waze soon?)
