Of course, that company is clearly not worth that amount of money even closely. It was a startup running exlusively on investors' money with no model of generating revenue whatsoever. Without the acquisition their perspective would be to run out of money and fade away. Yes, they have an impressive userbase, but even that userbase is hardly worth $1B.
The price paid obviously has nothing to do with the real value of the company. I guess Google managers have their motives. On the Google's scale usual business rationales do not work.
Obviously, the giants pay billions mainly because they can.
Speaking of the motivation, this deal looks pretty much like shutting down a competitor, though I do not know what Google will actually do.
Revenue - no idea if or how much money they made? IP - Patents on using location to perform traffic analytics? Talent - 100+ employees? Userbase - ~50 million users? Technology - Isn't the app easily replicable?
It's really confusing for entrepreneurs to know if they are building something of value when we can't discern how these companies are being valued!