Partnership with Location World is the first in a series of international partnerships designed to bring crowdsourced maps and road info to consumers, worldwide 

Palo Alto, Calif. - January 25, 2010 - Waze, the first global provider of crowdsourced live maps and real-time road information, today announced its first international partnership with Location World, the largest location-based services and solutions company in South America, based in Ecuador, with a strong, fast growing presence in additional Latin American countries including Panama, Argentina, Peru, Venezuela, Columbia and Chile.

Location World provides a wide variety of LBS services, enabling companies to develop applications quickly and effectively. Among Location World's customers are the leading local operators as well as big names in the public and private sector, including Telefonica - Movistar, Coca-Cola, Nestle, Manpower and many others. One of Location World's assets is the largest local geosearch database in Ecuador, with more than 140,000 entries, currently being used by Telefonica - Movistar, among other customers. 

Under the terms of the agreement, waze will use Location World's premium-grade maps for its service and, in return, will provide Location World with ongoing, real-time automated and community-generated map updates and real-time traffic information, transforming it into the most up-to-date map first in Ecuador, and then shortly in rest of Latin America.  Waze users in these countries will benefit from a fully localized service, with great base maps that significantly accelerate the creation of free turn-by-turn navigation, real time traffic information and community reporting from day one. 

In this partnership all sides benefit; Location World instantly upgrades their maps to become real-time maps, constantly updated via community crowdsourcing, providing them with more value, at significantly less cost. Waze, on the other hand, benefits from the use of a professional grade base map, significantly accelerating its community growth and international expansion. 

"The combination of waze's real-time map building and live crowdsourced technology with Location World's excellent maps and thorough geo-referenced content opens the door wide open for our users in Latin America," says Uri Levine, waze's President and Co-Founder. "As a result, we expect community growth in this region to accelerate exponentially, and we warmly welcome these new users to the world's largest global driving community."

Waze is being made available today in Ecuador with a fully localized client and website. More information can be found at http://www.ec.waze.com.

In addition to waze's partnership with Location World, waze is also forming alliances in multiple countries worldwide and is seeking partnerships with other international map owners.

"Our partnership program is a response to the increasing number of map providers who understand the benefits of partnering with a company like waze to remain competitive," says Levine. "Both sides gain in these partnerships; waze enables the map provider to turn their map into real-time, navigable asset, and the map providers allow waze to significantly accelerate community growth within the new geographies that we wish to develop in."

Parties interested in collaboration can contact waze for more information at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it