Apple has purchased Placebase, planning own maps service?
With federal investigators looking into Apple’s rejection of Google Voice, as well as a gentleman’s agreement between the two companies not to hire away each others’ employees, the Cupertino, California-based maker of computers, media players and smartphones may be seeking to disentangle itself from the search giant by creating a mapping service to replace Google Maps on the Mac and iPhone.
Computerworld reports that Apple has purchased Placebase, creator of the Pushpin Maps API, and has hired that company’s CEO and founder, Jaron Waldman to work on the “Geo Team.”
Placebase is a mapping services that’s similar to Google Maps, which includes more ways to customize maps with deep array public and commercial data sets, including boundaries, social and demographic, financial, cellphone coverage, traffic information and weather information. Here’s a video of Waldem demonstrating Placebase and Pushpin at at an O’Reilly where 2.0 conference last year.
via 9 to 5 Mac
That said, Apple has purchased an advanced mapping service that’s much deeper and more complete than Google Maps in the form of Placebase and its Pushpin API. What do you think they’re going to do with it?
The obvious tie in is hyper-local services for the iPhone, Mac and the tablet/touch device the company is widely expected to launch next year…
What’s your take?
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