Google’s Purchase Of Waze Would Deal A Death Blow To Other Companies’ Mapping Efforts

It’s been a heady few months for Israeli social mapping startup Waze. In January Apple was reportedly courting it with a $500 million offer (Corrected: we originally wrote “billion”); last month it was Facebook, for $1 billion. Now Google is planning to offer $1.3 billion, sources have told Globes, an Israeli newspaper.

Neither Google nor Waze would confirm the bid, Globes says. And observers have had reason to doubt acquisition stories out of Israel lately: as well as the collapse of previous bids for Waze, a Pepsico bid for Sodastream was recently reported, then hotly denied. But the search giant’s interest in Waze was first reported two weeks ago, and it would make a certain sense.

On the face of it, the purchase for what is effectively a not very big social network looks expensive. Waze is said to have around 50 million users, more than double what it had a year ago; Tumblr, which Yahoo acquired last month for $1.1 billion, has 114 million blogs and more than 300 million monthly visitors and is growing at a roughly similar pace.