KRISHNA KUMAR Regional Head

WAZE APAC – A GOOGLE COMPANY’

Driving in a traffic maze like Metro Manila has been made easier and faster with the help of Waze. Tapping the Waze has become second nature to Filipinos driving in the city, which is considered one of the world’s worst traffic situation.

Krishna Kumar, regional head of Waze Asia Pacific, says the navigational tool app will continue to make innovations to create more value to its audience and help solve transportation challenges.

The company

Waze was founded in Tel Aviv by a bunch of engineers. It was acquired in 2014 by Google. The acquisition of this social enterprise was a perfect complement to Google Maps where people help each other give the fastest information for routes and exact location real time.

Now, Waze is the fastest navigation platform for drivers to be able to reach destination as quick as possible. Meanwhile, Google Maps is more helpful for one exploring a city, a district, a landscape or even a view under water. As a discovery platform, Google Maps lets tourists or someone new explore an area.

“Waze is where people and technology meet to solve transportation challenges,” says Kumar. It is a platform that empowers communities to contribute road data, edit Waze maps, and update road conditions to improve the way people move about the world.

It has partnered with municipalities and transit authorities to reduce traffic and congestion — leveraging current infrastructure while impacting city planning. Waze also works closely with tech and automotive brands to reimagine what transportation looks like today.

This is because Waze believes a world with better transportation doesn’t have to be in the distant future. By harnessing the power of community to reverse negative trends in transportation, Waze can create a world where traffic is history.

With an AI in the background, the machine is constantly fed with huge data for it to learn making it capable to analyze and provide drivers correct information at the quickest possible time. In fact, the estimated time of arrival on Waze has proven to be 100 percent correct.

Combined with the ubiquitous power of mobile that empowers everyone with a smartphone and with cutting edge machine learning computing, Waze believes that the next generation will not have to deal with traffic anymore.

Collaboration Waze started with a goal to simply save five minutes every time.

“It may be small, but when one combines the amount of time for many years on the road that 5 minutes could be huge,” says Kumar, who for the past 15 years has been leading teams that drive digitization. He is currently pursuing Mobility Marketing with the power of location, as the next go to market challenge with Waze that endeavors to eliminate traffic altogether.

In the Philippines, the average time spend by a driver on Waze is 10 hours a month. Kumar said this makes the Philippines among the highest users of Waze. There are now 2.7 million Filipino Waters.

“I’ve spent two years in Jakarta, but it was not as bad as Manila. It is not flattering, but it tells us there is so much to do,” says Kumar, who now frequents Manila.

They have also collaboration in other cities like Jakarta, which is also implementing similar traffic reduction scheme as Metro Manila’s odd-even number coding.

Already, Waze is working with Metro Manila Development Authority by providing them data.

When Brazil hosted the Olympics, they consulted Waze on where to build flyovers and to see the choke points. Data is very important and accurate in helping solve a problem.

Through its Connected Citizens Program (CCP), Waze brings cities and citizens together to answer questions about traffic situation like incidents, road closure reports, construction, marathons, floods or anything that can cause travel delays.

This also enables government partners to respond more immediately. Waze aggregates its audience data, resulting in one of the most thorough overviews of road conditions real time.

“We have lots of very passionate editors, who are very vocal because they know the city,” says Kumar. There are roughly 70 volunteers in the Philippines on top of the community on the road that contribute to the conversation and fill in the information.

“So, the goal is the same, we join hands in solving the traffic problem,” says Kumar.

Drive to work It is notable that most of the users of Waze are people going to work and only 3 percent are professional drivers. These are people in a hurry to meet their appointments.

“Ours is driving to work than driving for work,” says Kumar.

“Because it is very predictable, Waze can provide the fastest route from point A to point B. Because the shortest distance may not be the shortest time:” says Kumar as he pointed out that, “The ETA is so amazing with 100 percent accuracy. We have an entire team that is so obsessed that they consider the process a failure if they don’t get the right ETA.” This specific team is located in Israel.

In this technology, he said, there is so much data and science behind it. There are 180 countries available on Waze with the US, Brazil, France and Malaysia as the biggest users.

“The Philippines is catching up. I would like to think that the Philippines is in the top 10 because they love the brand and experience,” says Kumar noting of the uniqueness of the Filipinos as they talk about Waze. So far, Filipino Wazers use the app 2.2 times on a daily average.

Google operates a back-office operation in Manila, but Waze, with a very lean local staff is still feeling the market.

“We look at the market and if it’s helping the city, then we are not shy of investing here,” he adds.

At the same time, the company is looking at improving its revenue from the Philippines through its advertising model.

Kumar also assures that Waze does not collect personal data of its audience, but only the most important facts – location of home and work place. It is just movement of regular office workers – from home to work.

Its advertising model does not intrude into one’s personal life. Rather, it adds value to its audience. With its users’ regular movement patterns, like on a Saturday there is grocery shopping or a stop at a coffee shop during week days, there are opportunities for advertisers. But Waze has ensured that these pop ups will only happen when the car is not in motion.

Most of all, Waze does not share its audience outside of the platform.

“Waze creates value of and not steal value from users,” stresses Kumar.

“We profile users without privacy intrusion,” says Kumar noting that their audience are profiled based on behaviors like eating in a fastfood or casual dining. They are looking at a critical mass of people.

Advertisements on Waze means value creation to users as it makes aware of locations that are relevant to users which other traditional media outlets cannot.

Thus, Waze is a good platform for both big and small advertisers or those small local brands located in a particular area only, but want to create brand awareness.

“We have great success broadly,” says Kumar, Kumar, who has been with Google for 8 years, including a year in Waze.

More to be done He does not call it challenges but proof points. Already, people love the brand and many are getting on board, relying on Waze for traffic updates. The fact that government bodies are talking to them show they are making an impact.

There may be other GPS in use by drivers, but Waze is top of mind. For Kumar, anybody who does not need its product and does not see them adding value can be a competitor. This makes it imperative that Waze constantly makes sure people need them because they add value that is more than their investment. A user also sorts of invest in Waze as he uses his data to be connected to the internet.

Kumar, who started his career in India as a manager of Indian radio before it was privatized in 2004, wondered at the many things that technology can do to ease traffic.

There is the future of flying cars that may change traffic direction in the future.

There are several measures adopted in most countries like carpooling. Governments like Philippines have also huge investments in transportation.

There is also the opportunity for a much bigger organization because technology business means building relationships with the local users. He cited having a smart team, who has the desire to do the job well to scale up their business.

“The tunnel is so long but at the end of it there are more small lights guiding us,” adds Kumar.

He shared their small focused group in Cebu where they held a community meet up with volunteer map editors, who actually edit the maps themselves and have deep access to its base maps.

“These are dedicated people and they don’t get paid by Google, but we graduate them as their contributions become more useful to higher status as community leader so it is very exciting,” adds the father of two little girls.

Fail fast

As a manager, Kumar is an advocate of “fail fast.” This means that in a hypothesis where a business approach may not be successful, then it is better to “fail fast.”

“Don’t be afraid to try something, but if it is not successful then go fail fast so you can start again soon,” says Kumar noting that progress becomes slow if you are caught in a box because you are afraid to fail.

He noted that industries choose leaders, who try to be better, but the technology industry is unique as it requires nimbleness to be able to act fast.

“So, if there are initial success, build on it. And if you fail, co-own it then put safety net and go to the next,” adds Kumar noting that: “Sometimes, we are so attracted to our ideas we don’t feel nice to let them go, but if it is not working then move on.”

“This ‘fail fast’ approach also creates a feeling that the team is doing something and at the same time feel secure because they are protected,” says Kumar, who regularly visit his parents in India especially during the Diwali Festival, which is equivalent to Christmas or the Thanksgiving celebration.

Lessons learned

In technology, he said, one of the biggest lessons is that innovation can happen anywhere.

“Innovation, can happen in any street corner. We celebrated 20 years of a business that started in a garage, just like Bill Gates. Competitors should be worried of people in garages because innovation is not only in Silicon Valley alone but in China, Indonesia and in far flung areas,” says Kumar as he noted of companies that failed to innovate as lessons.

“Innovation can happen anywhere and that’s what keeps us all on our toes,” adds Kumar, who has driven Google’s product and commercialization teams across various product areas in Mobile Apps, Display and Online video across geographies panning Asian countries including the last couple of years based in Indonesia accelerating Online Video in YouTube with the most traditional TV advertisers.

Although Google is a multi-billiondollar company, he said that, it can easily evaporate if it does not constantly innovate and create value.

The moment clients do not see innovation in a product or the product does not create value anymore, that’s a signal that the company is going nowhere.

That’s why companies that constantly innovate are winning in the game. Kumar looks up to the world’s innovators Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. He also looks up to Mahatma Gandhi for his non-violence approach to achieving goals.

“We have a modest start, we are adding value to people, to users and partners and finally to advertisers and if these three are done, I would like to say my job is done, but there are still many things to be done,” says Kumar.