Crowds create Wikipedia-style world maps

When Ben Gleitzman moved from New York to the San Francisco Bay Area, he used a talking turn-by-turn driving app to guide him across the country. In the middle of Wyoming, a voice told him to turn left where there was no road.

Rather than complain to the maker of the app, called Waze, he logged in and made a note for anyone else who happened to drive that way that the road wasn't there. Such niceties have started to add up. Taking a page from Wikipedia, services like Waze have marshaled armies of unpaid contributors and their GPS-equipped smartphones to map wide swaths of the world. Consumers, companies and even disaster relief organizations have come to rely increasingly on such "crowdsourced" maps and their key advantage: When the landscape changes, so can the map.

"I can see that it gets incrementally better every day," said Gleitzman, a 25-year-old programmer, who, these days, depends on Waze to steer him around traffic during his commute, thanks to hundreds of users in and around San Francisco whose cars' speeds and locations are tracked automatically as they run the app.

Waze started in Tel Aviv in 2006 as an open-source mapping project called Freemap and today claims 14 million drivers around the world, including more than 1 million in Israel alone. Of those total users, the company says, about 45,000 are dedicated map editors, while another 5,000 serve as regional managers to ensure the accuracy of the maps of their parts of the world.

Waze CEO Noam Bardin says, "Our goal in life is to save you five minutes a day on your way to work."

- AP