Waze plays the World Cup on the road

in Mobile News by Yohay Elam — June 15, 2010 at 12:07 pm | 2 comments

Waze, the Israeli provider of a social navigation application, isn’t missing out on the World Cup in soccer, and lays out a month long competition that runs hand in hand with games. Apart from 3 iPads which are at stake, there are many virtual awards.

Out of 32 teams, only the German team impressed its fans in the World Cup in soccer, which had a slow start. But in Waze’s competition 100 countries are participating in the first round. All the drivers in the countries where Waze is available are seeing small footballs. Driving through these balls scores points for the player and for the national team.

Similar to a real football / soccer game, only the best 11 drivers are counted towards the group effort, but the other people on the rooster aren’t only sitting on the bench – they still have a chance to win the personal awards – which are real, 3 iPads.

More details about this amusing competition can be found on Waze’s blog. This isn’t the first competition held by Waze, and it seems that they’re improving. The virtual balls will probably avoid falling into lakes, and the placing of them seems quite wise.

Similar to Foursquare and other companies, being rewarded for actions in the application engages the users and adds a lot of fun. Waze is now available on more devices and in more countries. We’ve recently reported about the growing usage of Waze in Ecuador. The small South American country is missing out on the real World Cup, but its drivers will sure enjoy munching those virtual balls while they’re listening to the games on the radio and stuck in Quito’s notorious traffic jams.

Website: http://www.waze.com
Abstract: Waze is a social mobile application providing free turn-by-turn navigation based on the live conditions of the road. 100% powered by users, the more you drive, the better it gets....  
Read more about waze in The Wadi Index.

Tags: featured virtual rewards waze world cup

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Author: YohayElam

Yohay Elam is a problogger, with Forex Crunch being his primary site. Yohay belongs to the founding generation of Israeli political group blog Black Labor, a writer in the The Networking Blog and maintains his personal bi-lingual blog. Before becoming a problogger, Yohay worked as a programmer in various Israeli startups such as Metacafe.