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" Facebook appears close to making another billion-dollar acquisition. TechCrunch reports that the social media giant is buying Waze, the social mapping and traffic app, for between $800 million and $1 billion.  Unlike other mobile navigation apps, which rely on mapping data from one of several big companies (Google, Nokia and TomTom, among them), Waze created its own maps using crowdsourced data. When someone fires up the app, it collects traffic and road information and sends it back to Waze, which uses the info to improve its maps and send real-time alerts to drivers regarding traffic and road conditions. It also has friend-tracking features built in already.  The possibilities for social interaction and marketing are endless. For years, we&amp;#039;ve heard promises of technology companies offering services and functionality that combine your social habits with mapping technology. But those promises have been unfulfilled.  For example, imagine you&amp;#039;re driving home from a hard day at the office. An alert pops up on your phone telling you that a close friend or friends just checked in at a restaurant along your route. The phone then asks if you want to contact them and meet up at the location. Or maybe you&amp;#039;re on a road trip and your smartphone dings, offering a discount and turn-by-turn directions to the closest Starbucks or some other spot along the route recommend by friends.  If Facebook&amp;#039;s acquisition deal goes down, we may finally see this stuff really take hold.  The benefit to Facebook is that it won&amp;#039;t have to rely on any other company for mapping data. It could apply its own social layers to the software in addition to what Waze provides already to deliver the ultimate mobile, socially relevant search engine. What do you think?  Via Techcrunch "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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