TQ updated readers on Monday, June 10th that Google is all set to buy Israel-based free social GPS service Waze for an amount ranging from $1 billion to $1.3 billion. Now on Tuesday, June 11th, Google officially made it known that it has got hold of Waze but the Mountain View-based company did not reveal the amount it had spent to make the deal happen. However, AllThingsD has claimed that the company has agreed to pay $1 billion in cash along with performance payouts and perhaps stock options too. “The deal was worth $1 billion in cash, plus $100 million in performance payouts in cash and possibly stock to the Waze staff, said people familiar with the deal.”
Nevertheless, the announcement has finally confirmed that all previous rumours regarding the Google-Waze acquisition were true. The announcement was made by Brian McClendon, Vice President, Geo through a blog post, which says that:
“We’ve all been there: stuck in traffic, frustrated that you chose the wrong route on the drive to work. But imagine if you could see real-time traffic updates from friends and fellow travellers ahead of you, calling out “fender bender…totally stuck in left lane!” and showing faster routes that others are taking.
To help you outsmart traffic, today we’re excited to announce we’ve closed the acquisition of Waze. This fast-growing community of traffic-obsessed drivers is working together to find the best routes from home to work, every day.
The Waze product development team will remain in Israel and operate separately for now. We’re excited about the prospect of enhancing Google Maps with some of the traffic update features provided by Waze and enhancing Waze with Google’s search capabilities.”
Welcoming the Waze team on becoming a part of Google, the search engine giant said that it will look to have a close working relationship with Waze in order to make sure that they should continue to “grow and prosper.”
Prior to this Google-Waze acquisition announcement, several media outlets have reported that Facebook and Apple were also interested in buying Waze, but later at AllThingsD’s D11 conference CEO Tim Cook shot down all such rumours by saying that his company did not bid for Waze. Later rumours suggested that Facebook has also pulled itself out of the acquisition race.
So finally the ball fell in Google’s court and the company did not miss the opportunity to seize the deal, in fact it was more than happy to make Waze a part of its team.
Source: iPhoneinCanada
Photo: iPhoneinCanada
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