Being Pro-Semitic: Waze

Do you use Waze to find your way from one place to another?

You can thank 3 Israelis who developed it in 2008 to offer real-time traffic updates for drivers in Israel to avoid congestion, accidents and other activity that results in slow-downs or detours.

At the time, Uri Levin, Ehud Shabtai, and Amir Shinar produced FreeMap Israel and sought local advertising for funding. As they built the product to be more robust and marketable, they changed the product name to Waze and in 2013, their software was sold to Google for a over one billion dollars, globalized and commercialized, making it of use to over 250 million drivers around the world as well as television news outlets and governmental operations centers. Waze is one of many products in our daily lives created and developed in Israel. Laser hair removal, thumb drive memory sticks, drip irrigation, robotic surgical software, and many other medical devices and software commonly used around the world today including the pill-sized camera that provides gastroenterologists options for patients’ disease detection without invasive procedures – all were developed in Israel for use around  the world.

Jerry Brodsky sourced at:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jun/11/google-buys-waze-maps-billion

https://web.archive.org/web/20090205040332/http://waze.co.il/about

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waze#cite_note-10

https://aish.com/israels-top-45-inventions/?utm_source=googlegrants&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=19561819333&utm_term=&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=19561819333&gbraid=0AAAAADnzuTPyrP3xq_PS88IHHwUikR5E6&gclid=Cj0KCQjw_IXQBhCkARIsADqELbLmxxHG_nv7uRzXikWU459ibP4XrD4419Qd3t80W5mTVKTmbou5WqEaAg5xEALw_wcB

Waze image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Waze_logo_2022.png