About a year ago, openplaces.com founder Fred Lalonde tweeted about Apple secretly acquiring the company that made Pushpin, a mapping API his company was using:
That company was Placebase , as described by its CEO Jaron Waldman in this video two years ago:
Map-tile checkers game
Most Cupertino watchers saw in Apple’s Placebase acquisition an opportunity to kick another Google property off its mobile devices. Unfortunately, Placebase is a dataset integrator over maps, not a provider of actual map tiles, of which there are only a few independent ones left in the world.
In 2007, for example, Nokia bought Navteq for $8.1 billion and TomTom paid Tele Atlas NV €2.6 billion in 2008. Mobile being the next frontier in mapping, Yahoo and Nokia announced yesterday a partnership where Navteq will provide Yahoo’s map and navigation services globally. Despite all this market activity, the most popular service still remains Google Maps.
While Google Maps was squarely aimed at consumers at its introduction in 2005, Placebase took a different route by integrating public and private datasets over data tiles targeting more sophisticated business applications. Waldman told GigaOm two years ago:
Google Maps is great for consumer usage, but we are making it easy for large companies to take our Maps API, customize it and then use it. We are being used for real estate, fleet tracking and traffic.
One of those white-label partners that used Pushpin APIs was PolicyMap, which has a great demo section showing how Placebase layers datasets over maps:
Google’s declaration of war across Apple’s entire product line on the eve of WWDC and Apple’s rejection of Google Latitude location-aware mobile map app from the App Store last year sets the stage for a number of intriguing possibilities for how Apple might use Placebase:
Digital maps, once a wondrous novelty that started with Google Maps on the desktop, are no longer a mere destination app on mobile devices. Mapping frameworks are beginning to be tightly integrated at the OS level and maps are becoming primary UI conduits to ever more sophisticated location-based services. Apple’s acquisition of Placebase was an affirmation of that reality and, hopefully, we’ll get to see the early results next week.
Click here to read this article by Kontra on the CounterNotions blog May 25th, 2010.