Grant Ritchie, CEO of crowd-sourced location data company Locationary wrote an article for TechCrunch last September in which he described five challenges Apple faced for building its new mapping service, which debuted on iOS 6 with a lackluster performance that eventually drove Apple CEO Tim Cook to a rare public apology. A mere ten months later, he has become a part of the effort to bring Apple out of its live mapping slump.
According to AllThingsD, Apple has acquired the Toronto-based startup location company, backed by Extreme Venture Partners and Plazacorp Ventuires. Sources tell the tech site that Locationary's technology and team were both included with the deal that was recently penned. As of right now, no price tag on the acquisition has been released to the public.
An Apple spokesperson, Steve Dowling, confirmed the deal with a statement that is similar to a lot of the other statements the company makes when it makes a new acquisition like this. "Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose of plans."
Since its poor release, Apple has been working hard behind the scenes to improve its maps feature for mobile devices. "We're putting all of our energy into making it right," Cook said in an interview last December.
Locationary will help. It acts as a sort of Wikipedia for local business listings using crowd-sourcing and federated data exchange from a playform called Saturn. This will collect, merge and continuously verify a massive database of information on local businesses and points of interest form around the world. This helps solve location service's biggest problem, which is out of date information.
This means that if a user searches for a restaurant in New York City, he or she will not only have the exact location on his or her map, a feature that Apple was previously unable to boast, but it will also have crowd sourced information on whether or not the place is good or even open. The most frustrating thing for someone unfamiliar with an area is to venture out to a business only to discover its closed for renovations. Hopefully these kind of mapping headaches will be at hing of the past for Apple users thanks to Locationary.
