Grizzly Analytics Blog

My article was published on the SeekingAlpha site: While Facebook is king in social but needs to beef up their mobile and location-based elements, Google is king in mobile and good in location-based services, but needs to beef up social. They also presumably want to defend their position in mapping, making it worth a lot to deny Waze to others. But is that really worth the rumored $1.1 Billion to Google, when they already have the most popular mobile mapping and navigation service? Clearly the answer is yes, but the question is why, and what it means for the future. What follows is my pure speculation as to what thinking is behind the scenes and what we can expect. See the whole article here :  http://seekingalpha.com/article/1495052-what-waze-might-mean-for-google  

After months of Waze acquisition rumors, it's now confirmed ( here and here ) that Google acquired Waze. An article on what Waze might mean for Google was just published on SeekingAlpha. Here's a previous article I wrote on Google's interest in Waze. More to come on the implications of the acquisition and predictions of what's yet to come.

The Waze acquisition rumors continue - now Globes is reporting that Google is set to acquire Waze for $1.3 Billion.  This follows the previous rumors of Facebook acquiring Waze , Apple acquiring Waze , and more. See below, after some background, for what I think is the most interesting element in Google's acquiring Waze, which is Waze's potential integration into Android. Here's what I wrote about 2 months ago about the prospect of Google acquiring Waze: Google is starting from the opposite end as Facebook but working towards the same goals - they have the popular mapping and location applications and are trying to gain a strong foothold in social networking. But for this reason, a Waze acquisition would help Google less than Facebook - it would improve what they have and move mapping in a social direction, but since they already have Google Maps, Waze wouldn't be as transformational an acquisition as it would be for Facebook. and here's my follow-up abou