Apple, Google and the map wars
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:
Mapping the battle
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:
- Apple may swap out Google from its Maps app on iPhones/iPads with another map data provider. There have been persistent rumors about Apple and Microsoft negotiating Bing search and map data services. (Google Maps does have some serious accuracy issues which the company will attempt to correct in a year-long effort starting this summer). While Google-to-Microsoft switch is somewhat unlikely in that Apple has already invested quite a bit of time integrating Google map services and renewed that effort with even better integration in the recently shipping iPads, all that was before the virulent anti-Apple crusade displayed at Google’s I/O developer conference last week.
- Apple also has the option of getting map tiles from other companies like MapQuest, the granddaddy of mapping services now owned by AOL or even the outright purchase of a map/navigation company like TomTom, as a low-ROI but defensive move. Placebase layers on top of raw map-data would abstract a new underlying service so that users may not even notice it (unless, of course, there are performance, accuracy or capability issues). Still, like online search, it’s not that easy to swap out a popular Google service without an equal or better one.
- Apple may continue to get Google map tiles over which it can graft increasingly more sophisticated and useful location services through the Placebase services. This would further differentiate Apple’s Maps app from Google offerings on Android and buy Apple more time to figure out how to disentangle itself from its Google dependencies.
- Perhaps Apple’s interest in Placebase was narrower and it simply bought talent to implement ancillary services like its Places features in iPhoto, iMovie, Aperture and potentially new apps yet to be introduced.
- Apple may have bought Placebase for its APIs which it may announce as part of an extended iPhone OS 4 framework next week at WWDC or later. This would give both Apple and App Store developers pervasive ability to integrate map/location services in a broad range of applications from advertising to marketing to analytics to social games. Rumored social networking apps like iGroups that recently surfaced in patents indicates Apple may indeed be getting serious about location-based infrastructure.
- Apple already has several patents covering macro-level location-based advertising/marketing and micro-level Near Field Computing exchange of identity/financial data for secure, instant and paperless payments. Placebase APIs could act as the visual underpinnings for the discovery of such services.
- Let’s also remember that Apple recently bought Siri which provides a dynamic framework to parse text and voice, breaking it down to actionable components to form complex searches from participating data providers. Spoken queries like “I want to see {A} nearby {B} only if it has {C}” can become far more intelligent if Siri and Placebase can neatly interweave to search/navigate/notify over Placebase data layers and use the familiar map interface for display.
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.
