Astro AWANI and Waze outsmarting traffic together

At a press event in Shangri-La Hotel today, Julie Mossler, Senior Director of Communications announced the partnership between Waze Inc. and Astro AWANI for its broadcast partner programme. Astro AWANI is the second international broadcast partner for Waze Inc., outside of the United States. Through the broadcast partner programme, Waze aims to bring its citizen-traffic reporting platform to the mainstream media - bridging traditional media with social networks and mobile content to augment TV traffic reporting.

“We are really excited to announce today that we will be working with Astro AWANI. We really hope moving forward that we will be able to work together and create a custom traffic update program for them that is going to help citizens with the way they have not been able to before”, said Julie Mossler at the press event.

Further commenting on the synergic partnership between Waze Inc. and Astro AWANI, “I think that AWANI is very forward thinking in the way they translate news to casual audience, working together with Waze, we can come up with very creative opportunities to translate what traffic means to the average person living in Malaysia. If we’re able to come up with interesting content that are easy to digest and can be seen on different platforms, it is definitely a win-win for both of us,” Julie continued. Waze is a crowd-sourced, free application currently available on the iPhone, Google Android and the Windows Phone platform. Waze incorporates real-time GPS data from its growing base of more than 50 million users and delivers highly accurate and useful traffic and navigation information. Drivers are able to select the fastest route easily, and voice navigation in local language gets them where they need to go, safely. Users are able to build and edit maps with details like speed traps, road construction and traffic accidents. Since the acquisition by Google in June 2013, users can now access Google Street View via Waze Livemap.

Also present at the press event, Dror Cohen, senior technician from Waze Inc. said that Malaysia started out without a base map on the mapping service, and was 100% built by Malaysian Waze users.

Waze is the most popular navigation app in the region, based on the number of downloads in the App Store in Malaysia; and is ranked at #16 in all ranked categories in the App Store in Malaysia. To date, Waze has nearly 1.5 million active users in Malaysia. Malaysia ranks among the Top 15 largest Waze communities out of the nearly 200 countries it serves. Of the 110,000 map editors globally, Waze has over 3300 map editors in Malaysia actively contribute to the Driver Generated Livemaps.