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Waze's traffic navigation app already shows ads prodding drivers to swing by fast-food joints like Dunkin' Donuts and Taco Bell. Now it's adding a new item to its menu—the ability to place orders at some shops.
On Tuesday, the Google-owned app will start letting drivers purchase coffee and other items from Dunkin' Donuts for pickup along their way. It's the first time that Waze has offered this kind of "order ahead" option, but unlikely to be the last.
If all goes well with the Dunkin' Donuts test, Waze plans to team up with other merchants so its millions of users can order pizza, reserve parking spaces, fill prescriptions and even buy groceries without having to open another app on their phones.
"It could be almost anything that a driver could order ahead and have ready for pick up," said Jordan Grossman, head of Waze's business partnerships in North America.
They should dispatch drones to bring the donuts to your car while you're stuck in morning traffic.
(Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Thursday March 30 2017, @03:30AM
I live in a big city with traffic jams from hell, where a 12 km drive can take an hour or more at the height of rush hour. Waze is plenty useful for finding routes to minimise traffic, and I use it just about every day. I basically turn it on after I’ve driven out the garage, pick a destination, and then it starts giving voice instructions on where to drive to get to there. I have music or an audiobook playing in the background, while Waze shows a map. Once it has plotted a route, I almost never need to futz it any more, unless I suddenly decide I need to go somewhere else, in which case it’s time to pull over and stop while I futz with it. I don’t know, but to me its cognitive load is fairly light. I rarely glance at it while driving except when it has failed to find a route which avoids traffic (mainly because my city is just like those Grishnakh described in another post: roads seem to have been planned by taking a bowl of spaghetti and dropping it on a sheet of paper, and construction zones and accidents are common), and there’s nothing else interesting to look at. I have a magnetic stand stuck on the windscreen of my car to which my phone is affixed when I’m driving, so if I do need to glance at it briefly my eyes are still facing the front, making it no worse than looking at the gauges. In my years of using it, Waze has shown me a couple of alternate routes to the office which I never knew existed before, so I do think its routing is at least decent. It otherwise works just like those older dedicated GPS navigation units and it plays nice with background music apps.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.