Apple acquires start-up Locationary

19 Jul 2013

Consumer tech giant Apple has acquired location data company Locationary for an undisclosed sum.

The Toronto-based start-up is a find, splice and merge business listing service that crowdsources information and plugs it into its federated data exchange platform called Saturn, ZDNet reported. This in turn validates the data continually to ensure that not only is the data accurate, but it’s also in a format that is consistent across the board.

The data collected and sorted by Saturn not only pinpoints the geolocation but also provides other information about a business, such as its hours of operation.

Apple has not revealed what it plans to do with Locationary, but odds are it will integrate its data with Apple Maps to improve that product.

After Apple Maps launched last year with iOS 6, a litany of complaints about the app followed.

Apple CEO Tim Cook even wrote an open letter to Apple customers, apologising for letting them down. He admitted the Maps app packaged with iOS 6 was flawed, and even recommended Google or Nokia maps instead.

Apple had created the Maps app following the decision to drop Google Maps with the launch of the iOS 6 mobile operating system.

Apple building image via Shutterstock

Tina Costanza was a journalist and sub-editor at Silicon Republic

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