Apple Purchase of Placebase Confirmed: Goodbye Google Maps?
Google and Apple’s very public, very messy ongoing lover’s spat is obviously not doing either company many favors in the media. Apple looks to be taking steps to ensure that should it need to, it can go without the do-everything leading Internet search provider.
To that end, it’s finally been confirmed this week by ComputerWorld that Apple did indeed acquire Google Maps competitor Placebase in July of this year. Former Placebase CEO Jaron Waldman is now part of the “Geo Team” at Apple, which suggests that the company was acquired so that Cupertino could work on its own, in-house Google Maps alternative.
Our own sister site GigaOM ran a profile of Placebase back in May 2008. It detailed the way in which Placebase’s PushPin product was able to stay afloat and compete with Google Maps, which offered its services completely free of charge. Placebase offered white label solutions for a price.
PushPin, and the follow-up, PolicyMap, which expanded PushPin’s features, competed by offering users the ability to layer on commercial and public data sets, including things like home sales, crime, demographics, employment, etc. Developers could also add their own data sets using a ...
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