Crowd-Sourcing Real-time Location Data

Di-Ann Eisnor is a community geographer at Waze. Smart phone penetration has reached 29% of US adult mobile subscribers and could approach 40% in next two years. This enables exponential growth in location-data and real-time traffic and road information from users. Waze has built an application that crowd-sources location data for use in global map creation, navigation and real-time traffic and road information. Current barriers to quantity and quality of these data are not related to technology or access but to usage. Waze incorporates game mechanics to increase usage from the traditional navigation 1X-2X per week to multiple X per day. This seminar will use Waze as a case study to review crowd-sourcing in location data collection, look at benefits to drivers and cities, propose strategies for increasing usage and look at some of the important challenges like safety and privacy we will face in the coming year.

Biography

Bio: Di-Ann lives in Palo Alto, by way of Portland, OR, Boston, New York City and Amsterdam. Di-Ann is a neogeography pioneer and serial entrepreneur employing all means to increase the world’s citizen mappers. Di-Ann functions as both Chairman of Platial, The People’s Atlas, and as Community Geographer at Waze. Platial is a widely adopted mobile and online social mapping service funded by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Ram Shriram, and others with approximately 15MM unique users. Waze is free crowd-sourced navigation and real-time traffic. Started in Israel and well past critical mass, Waze now has top quality map, navigation and traffic data in the country. Di-Ann is setting up US operations and crafting the cartography of “live mapping."