Placebase is now Apple-based
A little over a year ago we were looking at changing our map providers and we went through the usual proposal process with a few folks including Google Maps and Microsoft. But we also looked pretty closely at a little company called Placebase and their map platform PushPin (which I believe was their one and only product). Well it turns out the Apple recently acquired the little company.
Their platform and API support seemed to rival that of their 800lb gorilla competitors and being a small company, we figured we may get better individual support from someone like Placebase. And although I would have loved to have supported the little guy, ultimately we didn’t end up using them… there were a few factors involved, but price was one of them. But nonetheless their offering was impressive.
As a stand alone business trying to go after a mass market they were at a distinct disadvantage competing head to head with the likes of Google and Microsoft, and they seemed to be concentrating on more personal level of support for more sophisticated/complex users needs who wanted to take advantage of the platforms flexibility around layering a variety of geographically related data on top of a map… I got the feeling that they did a lot of government related work and were more likely to have a client needing to show the 100 year flood plain rather than the latest mobile social networking application.
I’ve seen a couple articles criticize Placebase for the inferior quality of the underlying map data… an argument which misses the point of the company. The company is trying to be a platform for others to create create a great map based experience… and from what I’ve seen the company’s PushPin solution is significantly more robust in its ability to handle a wide variety of underlying data and integrate it into the map experience. The Placebase business is not about having the best underlying data, its about the best way to present and manipuate underlying data as well as the tools to help create a great consumer experience. To criticize them for the quality of the underlying data would be like criticizing Facebook for only having profiles of ugly people.
To me, Apple’s interest in aquiring this company makes all the sense in the world. Apple was already a leader in opening location up to the masses with the way it made location front and center in the iPhone, but it doesn’t make sense to play that role as a leader in acquiring location and then just handing off the consumer experience for each location oriented interaction over to Google.
Location based services and location based advertising will only continue to grow in importance and the map displaying experience is just too important for Apple to continue to outsource.
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