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Good morning internet!
Today #ensakidag will address
Waze's new application for carpooling.
And I already feel like I have to watch myself, to not sound like
Gustav Mandelmann when he speaks about his sheep, because
I really love Waze. Waze is the
feature that helps us navigate in traffic.
It was created as a
community service, you could say, in
Israel back in 2006. It's already 12 years old now,
under the name Free Map Israel. 3 years later
they remade it into Waze, the company
was commercialized, 2013 it was bought
by Google.
Despite having Google Maps, Google bought
Waze, and
it's probably one of few examples where Google succeeded
in letting a service live and thrive parallel
to their own.
What separates
Waze from Google Maps is the focus on
the community and the human
interaction. You are really part of
something bigger when using
Waze. Just like Google Maps
it helps you to navigate by
having all the users automatically report back
data. So, when a number of Waze users
are standing still on the road because of a traffic jam, all the
Waze users behind them will automatically be redirected
to another road.
So you don't actively have to do something
when you're stuck in traffic. But on the other hand you can report
that there is a
car on the side of the road. Manually
report it. Or you could report that this
road no longer exists or it's closed off due to roadwork.
When you drive into a
gas station it can ask you if you want to
update the gas prices on this
station. So, you can actively help out.
We are going to come back to that in the end.
I just want to tell you about the Carpool app.
It is a separate app which
is not available in Sweden yet, it's just available
in a small number of limited markets.
Usa and Israel for example.
They released this about a year ago
and they are now relaunching it.
What they've done now is that they put in
more filters. So that you can
sort of like in Uber, that you can
choose who you want to ride with and who you want to pick up
based on star ratings and mutual friends
and maybe first and foremost if you share the same
place of work. You can
get a little extra security in this system.
And you can get even more security by
actually adding filters which allows you to for example
choose only female drivers.
You can match based on gender and a number of other parameters.
The point of this is when you're
carpooling, someone without
a car can ride with someone else.
You can be a group that take turns driving.
There is a financial
incentive in this. Not like
Uber where you make money, but
up to the, what do call it, the
decided tax limit on
milage, you can get back. So,
the people
riding with you can help you with gas money basically.
You also get other
routing options, you can drive in
the carpool lane and so on.
It finds the quickest way for you.
I think this is super smart and it really builds
on the whole vision that Waze has
and that they really live, that
they want to make a community from this. They don't just want to be a traffic service.
This takes us to
what I think we should learn from Waze. If you
compare, what I was talking about before, Google Maps
deliver a bunch of passive
data from their users back
to the app
and makes the service better.
Waze does that to.
A bunch of passive data flows from your app to
Waze's servers.
But Waze also has this active element where they
ask the user for help.
And I can see that, if you have
a healthy vision of why you're doing this. This
clear community or solidarity thinking.
If you have a technical platform that allows this
and if you have
a sufficient amount of users,
it's a done deal. You
can see it like why Wikipedia
won over the national encyclopedia.
We simply do it together. There is a strong
sense of community on the internet and
wisdom of crowds and all these mechanisms make
these things work. The question I want to ask you,
is that in your company, in your organisation,
where you have som sort of distance towards your client.
What do you ask your clients to help you with?
Or is the client just
a wallet to you? Or is the client
just a
demanding recipient of your services? Or
do you every now and then ask
your client to engage in
your common interest?
I think it is super exciting to learn from Waze.
I think we all should.
This has been #ensakidag number 161, I think.
Produced by me Joakim Jardenberg together with
the crew at Bredband2,
the internet operator who loves to listen when others talk.
It is subtitled by the crew
at Contentor who
by lunch make sure there are both Swedish and
English subtitles on this.
Good stuff. Come along in this discussion now and
I'll see you tomorrow again with another #ensakidag.