With Places (and your help), Waze mapping gets smarter on Android and iOS — gigaom.com

Taking the same crowd-sourcing approach it applied to traffic, the Waze mobile app is going to improve the quality of information about local businesses and residences. It will need help from its users, though, and that’s where the new Places feature comes into play. The latest version of Waze, which is owned by Google, lets people update or add information about the places they visit. The company did much the same when it debuted, sharing user-submitted data about traffic on the roads. With Places, it’s the same recipe, only applied to locations. The idea is that if everyone adds details about the places they visit, the whole community benefits. Of course, that user-submitted data will also make a fine addition to Google Maps as Google bought Waze last year for a reported $1 billion.

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