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Seth Weintraub

Apple Ink

Apple purchased Placebase in July to replace Google Maps?

19 comments

TAGS:Apple, Google, Jaron Waldman, Maps, Placebase, pushpin
IT TOPICS:Macintosh & Apple, Mobile & Wireless, Personal Technology

On July 7th, Fred Lalonde, the founder of openplaces.org announced in a tweet that Apple had bought the company that produced the Maps API that his company used in their software.

Pushpin is the name of the software API that Openplaces uses and it is made by a company called Placebase.

"Apple bought PlaceBase - all hush hush. Pushpin site taken offline. Hyperlocal iPhone?"

Then, nothing for a few months. I had seen the post awhile back but couldn't find anything to back it up - the Internet drew a blank. This week, however, I revisited the information. I decided to do a background check on PlaceBase's founder and CEO, Jaron Waldman.

Turns out, he's no longer founder and CEO of PlaceBase in Los Angeles. He's now part of the "Geo Team" at Apple. -whatever that is. Jaron Waldman PlaceBase Apple maps

The former CTO of Placebase is now an engineer at Apple as well.

Placebase.com has been pulled offline and Pushpin.com forwards to the API help pages.

Yep, Apple bought Placebase. But what are they going to do with this software?

Placebase is similar to Google Maps in that it is a mapping service and has the world mapped out. You can zoom in and out and it has different layers you can superimpose over your mapping data. It does other things better than Google, however. It was featured on GigaOM last year:

Waldman thought differently. 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). The product is called PushPin.

Here's a video of Placebase CEO Jaron Waldman demoing his product at an O'Reilly conference last year.

A good example of the software in use is http://policymap.org. Like Openplaces, Policy Map uses the Pushpin API that Apple purchased as the underlying technology in its mapping product. As you can see there are a dizzying amount of layers involved, much more than Google, Microsoft and Yahoo can offer in their mapping software.

But I'm not so sure Apple wants to be so complex. The reason for purchase might simply be for the maps.

I think Apple wants to free itself from depending on Google for its maps on the iPhone and iPod touch devices. Apple also currently uses Google Maps in iPhoto in the Places feature.

Also, there have been issues lately with Apple's use of Google Maps for its Maps.app iPhone application. Google recently tried to get its own mapping application, Google Latitude, approved at the App Store but Apple said it was too similar to one that already existed. (Google Earth was approved). The FCC got involved and now it is a big mess.

Apple also recently let Google's Eric Schmidt go from their board of directors because Apple and Google were competing on too many fronts, notably Operating Systems. If Apple and Google do end up competing down the road, Apple doesn't want to depend on a competitor for its software (See Microsoft Office for the Mac/Windows).

It may be a smart move for Apple to buy its way out of its dependency on Google now, while it has the chance.

Somehow, I hope that it isn't just maps that Apple is after. I think those big brains in Cupertino can figure out some even cooler things to do with all of that data - perhaps it has something to do with that tablet we've all been hearing about?

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What People Are Saying

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Exciting new iApp: iMap

Submitted by Anonymous on October 2, 2009 - 1:08 A.M.

FREE with all iMacs, iPhone, iTouch and all MacBooks. iMap.

Now, even you can get lost with a simple track-pad double click. Why search Google to get lost with the hot new iMap in the dock.

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Exciting new iApp: iMap

Submitted by Anonymous on October 2, 2009 - 1:07 A.M.

FREE with all iMacs, iPhone, iTouch and all MacBooks. iMap.

Now, even you can get lost with a simple track-pad double click. Why search Google to get lost with the hot new iMap in the dock.

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Google maps are horrible

Submitted by Anonymous on October 1, 2009 - 5:27 P.M.

Google images for my area (populated part of Florida) are horribly out of date. They are at least 5 years old and reflect none of the development or scars in the landscape left by the 2004 hurricanes.

I spent part of an afternoon working through the Google switch board and found the guy in charge and asked him to please update the database. I know their vendor has them - I spoke to the vendor personally. What an arrogant pompous ....

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Evolving Maps app

Submitted by Mark Sigal on October 1, 2009 - 1:28 P.M.

While I am a strong believer in the inevitability of Apple/Google evolving into Frienemies in the months ahead (see: The Chess Masters: Apple versus Google - http://bit.ly/IHPmW), I think this is more a case of Apple adding geo-locative DNA to their bench and continuing their innovation around the Maps app, which while powered by Google Maps under the hood, is nonetheless developed by Apple in terms of look, feel and supported workflows.

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Nice reporting.

Submitted by GeoWhiz on October 1, 2009 - 1:19 P.M.

"As you can see there are a dizzying amount of layers involved, much more than Google, Microsoft and Yahoo can offer in their mapping software."

Riiiiight, much more than they CAN offer?

You have no idea what you're talking about, and you should probably get a GIS consultant in here before making such inflammatory and uneducated remarks.

You think maybe the geo teams at those three companies have been working on this whole map thing for a few years now? Think maybe they've put some significant resources behind their offerings?

Ever think that maybe the decision to hide or display "dizzying amounts of layers" was made intentionally?

"I'm going to the store, let me dig through 50 GIS layers that look like some college freshman in an intro to ArcGIS class put together to see where the heck I'm going."

There are two major revolutions in GIS that those 3 companies brought to the table.

They made the end product of millions of man hours of GIS work available to all the world extremely quickly - thus exposing hundreds of millions of otherwise novice users to geographic gold - free.

They also decided that a search paradigm was better than a traditional "load all the layers and have a table of contents that is only visible on a 4 foot tall monitor" approach.

Bottom line, users will keep using the big boys maps and Apple knows this. Look for Google Maps usage to soar on the many Android's coming to market - and Bing maps usage soaring on Windows Mobile. The Windows phones are dogs right now, but with Zune software likely coming to the platform in WinMo 7 and Microsoft already showing great capability with Live local applications and further investment in Bing Maps. So Apple will have to chose whether to incorporate their competitors maps that their users love, or try to sway millions of their iSheep that PlaceBase is better. Sorry Computer World, just don't see that happening.

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Crowdsourcing traffic data

Submitted by William Carleton on October 1, 2009 - 9:47 A.M.

Seth, very interesting post. I learned recently that iPhone users don't contribute to the crowdsourcing of the data that shows in the traffic representations on Google maps, including the maps app Google supplies on the iPhone. See e.g. http://jkontherun.com/2009/08/25/crowdsourcing-brings-better-traffic-data-to-google-maps-except-on-iphone/ One more sign that Apple intends to move away from the Google supplied map app built in, to one that would include traffic flow based almost overnight on data from hundreds of thousands (I'm presuming they will let users crowdsource, once they publish their own app)?

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Not all it's cracked up to be

Submitted by Anonymous on October 1, 2009 - 8:48 A.M.

Seth, you are over-analyzing this one without much information. Placebase was failing and had been trying to find an exit for quite some time. If this was an acquisition at all, which I don't think you can confirm, it was just to acquire some talent within Apple, which obviously has some geo tech within some of its apps.

Be a real journalist and actually investigate the story by asking around the geo industry and you'll find that employees of Placebase were desperately trying to find jobs because of the company's failure for much of this year. Good for Apple that they scooped up some smart people, but it is hardly the larger conspiracy you are cooking up.

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As a Placebase employee, I

Submitted by Placebase employee on October 1, 2009 - 10:08 A.M.

As a Placebase employee, I can tell you that you are 100% wrong Anonymous Coward. The company was doing well and Apple had to come in with a lot of cash to pick it up.

The technology is fantastic and if you had read the Gigaom link you'd know PB are bootstrapped without the need for venture funding and pulling in millions/year.

Perhaps you should be the one doing the legwork

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Congrats to the team from DeadCellZones.com

Submitted by Jeff Cohn on October 1, 2009 - 4:41 P.M.

Hats of to Jaron and the team who spent many years bootstrapping the company and we love the software. Crowdsourcing is a great application of the software which we have proven with http://deadcellzones.com. The map collects and efficiently renders thousands cell phone coverage complaint map for AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile.

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I'm looking forward to what Apple's up to

Submitted by Some Anonymous Dude on October 1, 2009 - 4:15 P.M.

You're company had a great product and I'm interested in seeing what comes of the integration of your product into an Apple product.

I've tired of seeing some great Google Maps for Mobile features coming out on other platforms long before the iPhone app, see Symbian, Android, WinMo, etc. - with some cool stuff not ever showing up on the iPhone, so I sensed a schism in the Google/Apple partnership occurred some time ago.

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