Headline Feeds
Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) has purchased Poly9, a Canadian Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Earth competitor, according to press reports Wednesday.
Apple did not respond to an inquiry seeking comment on the reports, which apparently originated with a French-language tech site Cyberpresse. Poly9's website was offline Wednesday.
The company describes its primary product, Globe, as "a cross-browser, cross-platform 3D globe." It is used by a variety of customers, including LinkedIn, Earthshots.org and Santaclaus.net for its Santa tracker.
Poly9 has developed APIs for Apple, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) and other clients in recent years, according to Cyberpresse. Most of its employees reportedly have relocated to California.
Upcoming Mapping Service?
The Poly9 purchase would seem to complement Apple's purchase last year of Placebase, a mapping service that offered the ability to integrate various kinds of data. That service has since been taken offline. The purchase was widely seen as an effort by Apple to develop a mapping service to replace Google's map service on the iPhone.
What specifically Apple is up to is, characteristically, unknown to anyone outside the company. However, it's clear that the strategy is one of shutting out Google, one way or another, said Rob Enderle, principal of the Enderle Group.
"By acquiring these mapping companies, Apple not only gets the ability to provide these services and collect the related revenue themselves," he told TechNewsWorld, but also gets "the intellectual property that could allow them to deny some of these same services to companies providing Android phones."
IP Play
Given reports that indicate Apple physically relocated Poly9 from Canada to California, Enderle observed, the acquisition is likely more for the intellectual property -- and an effort to keep it away from competitors -- than it is a precursor to an impending service.
"It is a mapping technology, and it looks similar to what Google is using in Google Earth, which runs on the Android platform. If Poly9 is better, or has stronger rights, then it could be used to enhance current or pending IP actions against Android customers," Enderle said. "The way Apple is handling this, it looks like it is mostly an IP play."
Google and Apple have had an increasingly strained relationship since Google launched its mobile operating system, Android, and fielded a handset of its own, the Nexus One.
Talkback: 
