Apple Creating A Google Maps Competitor? Yeah, There’s Gonna Be An App For That

• 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 [CW]. Pushpin is the name of the software API that Openplaces uses and it is made by a company called Placebase. How did everyone find out? Simply a Tweet from the former founder which said “Apple bought PlaceBase – all hush hush.  Pushpin site taken offline.  Hyperlocal iPhone?”
• How do we know it’s true. For starters, the former CTO of Placebase is now an engineer at Apple as well and the site has been pulled offline. Here is what Om said about the company 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.

Tagged as: Acquisitions, Apple