Facebook is now very much in the mobile race. In recent months they’ve released Facebook Home, an Android based service that makes sure you’re never Facebook-free. If you’ve read my earlier blogs, you know how I feel about that one. But FB isn’t stopping there.
Facebook is now partnering with Waze, an Israel based traffic and navigation app, for the sake of integration. It’s rumored Waze has been offered around a billion dollars for their services. There’s even talk of bringing all Waze offices to the USA. If this deal comes to past, it would be Facebook’s biggest purchase since Instagram, which cost around $750 million. Was the deal worth it? That depends on who you ask. As of April 2013, Facebook has 750+ million mobile users. I access it on my?Apple device.?In 2012, Facebook surpassed one billion users. ?They say the next billion users will come from countries like India and China, with their booming economies and population growths.
Let’s look at Waze. They have 47 million users, more than twice the users they had last year. The majority of those users are outside the US. Both companies are keeping hush about this possible merger. But this makes perfect sense to me. But Facebook, let’s do this right. Learn a lesson from Apple maps, and what a fiasco that was. And if FB and Waze can come together and reach out to rising economies like China and India, that would be an economic dream for both companies. Plus, let’s say someone using FB gets lost in a foreign land. They can just go on Waze and find their way. What other ways can both companies benefit? Or is this merger a bad idea?