Has Apple bought a mapping service?

Stephen Withers
Friday, 02 October 2009 06:07

Opinion and Analysis

If Apple has acquired Placebase, that helps to explain why the iPhone maker declined to sell Google's Latitude software (which lets you share your location with other users) through the App Store, leaving Google to implement it as a web application.

Apple could be planning to provide similar functionality in a future iPhone upgrade. But Placebase's technology also provides an easy way of layering data onto maps.

Furthermore, there's a reverse geocoding facility that takes a location specified by latitude and longitude and says where it is in a variety of ways. Country, state and city are fairly obvious, but US locations can also be described in terms of zip code, school district, congressional district, and others.

You can see how this could be useful to househunters keen to get their kids into a particular school - rather than taking the estate agent on trust, just pull out an iPhone, tap the screen a few times and you might see which zone you're in. Naturally, this example relies on the geographical data being available, but it serves as an illustration of what could be possible.

Another possibility is that Apple will continue to use Google as a map supplier (Google seems to have stitched up deals for reasonably detailed maps for much of the world), while adding functionality to applications with the Placebase technology.

And it might be a mistake to assume all this is only relevant to the iPhone. Snow Leopard includes the Core Location framework, which uses the "available hardware" to provide the user's position and heading. Maybe that's not particularly exciting on current hardware, which relies on identifying visible Wi-Fi networks to determine the location, but it could get more interesting down the track.

Now, about that supposed Mac OS X based tablet...