TechCrunch reported on Friday that Apple very quietly acquired
Spotsetter, a personalized map service that can compete with Google
Maps. The report states that this deal was done mainly to take over the
technology created and utilized by the start up company and it’s two
founders, both of whom have extensive industry experience.
Stephen Tse was an ex-Google Maps engineer. He was joined by Johnny
Lee, a former consultant at Siemens and CTO at FitFriend. The pair
founded Spotsetter as a new maps system that combined reviews and
recommendations from friends and other types of data to generate
personalized social maps catering to specific users.
Spotsetter also used information pulled from personal accounts
tethered social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to
formulate these maps and recommendations. The start up company received
the $1.3 million needed to establish the company. THis was generated
through seed funding from Rahul Prakash, 2020 Ventures and Javelin
Venture Partners according to CrunchBase.
The acquisition of the company by Apple was indirectly confirmed by
Lee through a post on the company’s blog only a week ago. While Lee did
not specifically mention Apple purchased the company, he did mention the
company was closing down operations for the application.
Lee posted on his blog, “With fondest emotions, I’m announcing that
we are closing down Spotsetter app. We still have big dreams for
personalized search for places and look forward to seeing great progress
in this area. Thank you everyone for your support over the past years.”
This is only one of many recent acquisitions from Apple, who recently
acquired Beats for $3 billion. It appears as though Apple is broadening
their horizons in order to better expand their company and compete
against fierce competitors such as Google.
It seems as though Apple has their eye on Google in particular with
this acqusition. Apple hasn’t had a good history with map applications.
Google Maps is the go to application for navigation and the acquisition
of Spotsetter seems to indicate that the company is hoping to make a
successful jump into this market.
