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Report: Apple buys mapping company Poly9

Apple has reportedly acquired Canada-based Poly9 and moved the majority of its employees to California. It would be the second mapping company that Apple has purchased in less than a year.

Jim Dalrymple Special to CNET News
Jim Dalrymple has followed Apple and the Mac industry for the last 15 years, first as part of MacCentral and then in various positions at Macworld. Jim also writes about the professional audio market, examining the best ways to record music using a Macintosh. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. He currently runs The Loop.
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Jim Dalrymple

Apple could be upping the ante in its battle with Google as the company reportedly purchased Poly9, a mapping company based in Canada.

AppleInsider on Wednesday cited a report from French-Canadian news site cyberpresse.ca saying that Apple bought the company and has already moved the majority of workers to California. While many companies that get purchased post a note to their Web site, Poly9's site appears to be offline this morning.

Apple representatives were not immediately available to confirm the purchase when contacted by CNET.

Poly9 has worked with some big organizations in the past including Microsoft, Yahoo, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), and MSNBC. While there is no clear indication what Apple will do with the technology, a demo of the Poly9 Globe is still available on Skype.

Poly9 would be the second mapping company Apple purchased in the past 10 months. In October, Apple purchased Placebase, a company that produced a maps application programming interface called Pushpin and offered a mapping service much like Google Maps.

Both products could easily compete with Google Maps and Google Earth, products that are available for the Mac, iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. While Google and Apple compete in the mobile market now, Google has remained the default search engine and mapping application for Apple products.