After a launch in Israel last year and in the United States last summer, mapping and traffic crowdsourcing start-up waze announced the availability of its platform globally.

Through a community-based approach, waze harnesses driver-generated data in order to build navigable road maps. The waze application runs on users' smartphones, while automatically and anonymously sending back GPS points as they drive. This data is then used to build and continuously update the road grid itself, road changes, and more. All of this information is collected passively, but drivers can also take a more active role, by joining the map editing arm of the community online at world.waze.com.

“drivers have organically formed their own groups and have started using waze to build local maps in over 20 countries around the globe, including Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Singapore, Thailand, Kazakhstan, and Trinidad Tobago. “, said Waze in a statement.

“Even without specific country support, we were amazed to see wazers on our live map in clusters all over the world self organizing,” added Noam Bardin, CEO of waze. “We are committed to fostering this community of users and supporting them with the new infrastructure launched today.”

Waze is currently available for Android, iPhone, Symbian and Windows Mobile smartphones.

Rather than going region by region waze management decided to open up the platform globally and see where it works and where it does't, which is probably a wise decision. However, unlike Israel where the map data was started step by step and the United States where there was at least a basemap from USGS, in the rest of the world the first users will face a blank map screen when starting using the application. It will take some time and dedication from potential users to get a decent map in starting from scratch.

We can expect waze to get some success and momentum in a few markets, but with various level of coverage and accuracy, monetization might get difficult, particularly for the map data which is facing OpenStreetMap as a free option and commercial suppliers in the other end of the market. Traffic and speedcam information is probably where the money is for waze.