A Quebec based mapping company has been bought by Apple. The company in question is Poly9 and it’ rumored that its entire staff has now been shifted to Apple’s Silicon Valley office. This acquisition is fourth by the company this year. The news was made public by the French-Canadian news site Cyberpresse. However it was not possible to reach either apple or Poly9 for any comments o the deals and its terms and conditions. This is not an unknown fact that Apple barely makes its plans or even lets anyone get a whiff about them.
Another identity of Poly9 is as the makers of the Poly9 Globe which is a 3-D geolocation tool that is browser based. As per the company itself tool is much popular and used by many big companies as Sanyo, Skype, and LinkedIn. Poly9 also has the history of making applications programming interfaces for Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, and other large corporations. The 5- year old company gained a lot of fame by providing the software used by the NORAD to track Santa Claus on Christmas Eve.
Apple is thought to be ready to develop its own mapping software with the assistance from the employs of the Poly9 for its flagship devices the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. Another leaf has been added to the ongoing tension between Google and Apple. Apple must be surely planning to outdo the Google Maps as the default mapping application on its mobile hardware. A homegrown hardware would be much better to satisfy Steve Jobs than Google’s.
This deal comes in tow with the deal by Apple that recently saw the company buy Siri a voice-search iPhone application in April. Experts are believed to expect the company to integrate the two companies to stiffen competition to Google maps; which is already taking market share away from Apple’s iPhone 4 by its Android mobile platform.
Other deals by the company this year are the companies Intrisity, Quatto Wireless. Apple had surpassed Microsoft this year as the top technology company.