Boston, MA 06/14/2013 (wallstreetpr) – Shares of Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) were up by 0.32% and currently trading at $879.30 with volume of 0.915 million shares traded compared to average volume of 2.27 million.
Months of buzz about Google acquiring Waze, an Israel-based, community-sourced mapping software, has finally materialized. The technology giant announced that it had struck the deal for an approximate price of $1.3 billion. According to Brian McClendon, vice-president of Google Geo-products, the development team that makes Waze will continue to function separately from Israel for the time being.
Waze is a freely available social Global Positioning System (GPS) application made in Israel by Waze Mobile. It guides users by navigating them through routes that are traffic-free. It draws on the power of social networking by extracting information from drivers who are ahead of the current user. A study reveals that 47 million people use Waze across 193 countries.
Waze will give a boost to Google Maps’ traffic update feature and improve its own product with the search prowess of Google. Google seeks to concrete its position as the leader of the navigation industry by employing this socially-driven, real time technology.
Google’s tradition of innovation has served it well in the past and this new investment might add another feather in its cap. It comes as no surprise then that Google is set to earn more from mobile advertising than all of its competitors combined for the second time in a row.
In a report released on Thursday, analysts at eMarketer predict that Google will earn around $8.9 billion dollars as revenue from mobile ads in 2013. If it turns out correct, the company will be holding 56% share of the market. The runner-up, Facebook Inc., is projected to gather a mere $2 billion. This resounding success is attributed to the popularity of Google’s innovative mobile applications like its search engine, Gmail, Chrome and not to forget Maps.
