Sam OliverReports of the purchase of Placebase, maker of Pushpin and openplaces.org, first surfaced in July. They were confirmed this week by ComputerWorld, as the company's former CEO, Jaron Waldman, is now allegedly part of the "Geo Team" at Apple. The Cupertino, Calif., company has never confirmed the acquisition.
In 2008, Placebase was profiled by GigaOm. At the time, a new product called PolicyMap was revealed. Using the PushPin API, PolicyMap would aggregate data on subjects such as demographics, home sales, crime, mortgage lending, school performance and more. The company reportedly earned millions of dollars in revenue and survived without any venture capital funding, successfully competing with Google's free Maps.
"Waldman thought differently," the report said. "He decided to compete with Google and other free mapping services by doing two things: One, by offering customizations and tons of features that integrated private and public data sets in many diverse ways. (He knew it would be a while before Google would get around to offering customization). His other twist was to offer a way to layer commercial and other data sets (such as demographics and crime data) onto the maps using an easy-to-use application programming interface (API)."
Weeks ago, when Google publicly revealed the content of its letter to the FCC in response to a government inquiry, it was discovered that Apple allegedly rejected the Google Latitude Application, because Apple believed the software could replicate the native Maps application included with the iPhone — software also created by Google. Apple said that the new software could "create user confusion" with Google Maps.
In August, Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, stepped down from the Apple Board of Directors. The two companies were continuing to encroach on each others' businesses, and were under investigation from the Federal Trade Commission for a possible violation of antitrust laws through unfair collaboration.
With the latest acquisition, it would appear that Apple could be building its own Google Maps competitor based on the technology found in PolicyMap from Placebase.
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60 Comments
i rememeber Google Maps sucked when it first came out and it took them a few years to get it working right
Thank goodness for that, I'm quite relieved to hear this news, location info is crucial to so many apps, and would have been very dangerous to leave in the hands of google alone. Especially as apps become increasingly location aware in the future.
The reality is that Google is no longer a partner but a direct competitor. A company can not, and should not, rely on a competitor for any service or parts for their key products.
Google's focus is now on Android and the software features for their phones. Apple is now secondary (or worse).
Watch for the replacement of Google Maps on future releases....possibly 4.0 is my guess (June '10). Google Maps will be moved to App Store for anyone to voluntarily download....but it won't be a base App anymore.....and won't be the default Map for other programs to use.
No more Google Monopoly over our lives! All Apple has to do is fix their ugly user interface and make it really useful. Placebase has very strong foundation, I can only imagine what Apple can do with it.
The reality is that Google is no longer a partner but a direct competitor. A company can not, and should not, rely on a competitor for any service or parts for their key products.
Google's focus is now on Android and the software features for their phones. Apple is now secondary (or worse).
Watch for the replacement of Google Maps on future releases....possibly 4.0 is my guess (June '10). Google Maps will be moved to App Store for anyone to voluntarily download....but it won't be a base App anymore.....and won't be the default Map for other programs to use.
You want to remove the branding of the most well known mapping software in the world and replace it with an unknown solution as the default on the iPhone?
I hope you realize that every time Apple talks about the maps application, it's not called "Maps", but "Google Maps". And their name is displayed prominently. Trying to remove that from the phone (even if they can download it on the App Store) would throw a TON of people into a fit.
And then you have to somehow argue to me that a start-up company is better than a company who's been working on this for years. I'm not saying it's impossible, just very difficult to prove that point.
if anything, the purchase of this company is probably more about getting more data sources for the Google Maps app than anything else. It's about making their implementation of Google Maps better. I mean, the Google Maps app on the iPhone is nothing special, and uses public APIs. It's not like Google can yank control and deny access or something (they could, but they're not that dumb). I'd say it's more about making sure that the Apple implementation of Google Maps is better than the Android version.