Locationary Apple
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- Jul 19, 2013 Apple is facing stern competition from market incumbent Google in the online mapping tools market but from now on it is getting help from a Canadian big-data startup, Locationary. On Friday it was reported by AllThingsD that the Toronto bcompany had been snapped up by Apple for an undisclosed amount.
- According to a new report, Apple has acquired Toronto-based Locationary, a Canadian startup that provides crowdsourced location data, for an unknown amount. The deal, which has already closed, includes both the company’s tech and team.
Apple’s mapping-related acquisitions keep rolling along. Last week it was revealed that the company snapped up Embark, my favorite app for navigating NYC Subways. Lots of speculation has been swirling around these moves, as it goes for all things Apple. But a lot of it has been misdirected (bad pun intended).
First, as background, this marks the third acquisition (not counting the Waze miss) in five weeks to strengthen Apple’s backbone in mapping and navigation. Locationary standardizes local business listings, while HopStop and Embark specialize in different flavors of navigation and public transit. These features were clearly missing in Apple Maps’ famous fail.
Jul 19, 2013 According to a new report, Apple has acquired Toronto-based Locationary, a Canadian startup that provides crowdsourced location data, for an unknown amount. The deal, which has already closed, includes both the company’s tech and team.
But moreso than the features, these post-Mapgate acquisitions are all about what’s behind the scenes in this age of big data. This goes back to what a lot of people don’t realize about Apple Maps: it’s is actually a pretty slick mapping tool. But what it has in dazzle, it lacks data; things like place listings, navigation and public transit.
For the sake of comparison, these are precisely the things Google has built by collecting mapping and routing data from hundreds of billions of queries since Google Maps launched in 2005. Any good mapping engine will iterate and apply this data to get better over time. In other words mapping is a game ultimately won on data — not flyover imagery.
I wrote as much before Apple Maps launched, when the beta was unveiled at last September’s iPhone5/iOS6 launch:
Ocasio cortez zuckerberg. However one thing Apple could underestimate is that mapping and local search are games ultimately won on function over form. In other words will it find what I’m looking for, regardless of pretty flyover images of Big Ben?
That’s governed by the local data and algorithms that deliver relevant search results. And this is new territory for Apple, which is now cobbling together a silo’d list of local content partners like Yelp and Waze.
Now realizing this, Apple’s is playing catch-up. And since it doesn’t have the time to build mapping data a la Google, it’s applying a tiny slice of its $145 billion cash reserve to buy its way out of the problem. The latest acquisitions achieve some degree of listings integrity and navigation, especially public transit directions famously lacking in Apple Maps.
While there’s been lots of agreement on most of the above, the punditry has unraveled in effectively answering the question of “why?” Apple’s intentions have been characterized by many as a play towards going deeper into ad monetization. Picture a sort of local flavor of iAd, fueled by local search queries and mapping impressions.
I don’t disagree that this will happen, but here’s the thing: it will be secondary to Apple’s true play which at all times is to sell more iThings. Because Apple is a company that makes most of its (very healthy) margins from hardware sales and carrier subsidies, most of its moves work toward making iPhones and iPads more attractive consumer purchases.
It reminds me of Google entering new areas as loss leaders to boost or establish positioning of its core search revenues (Android’s true play). With Apple, just look at the numbers: there’s a far greater economic stake in the core revenue stream of selling iThings than in entering the the competitive and challenged mobile local ad game where it has no footing.
That core business has created one of the most valuable companies on earth with 2012 revenues of $156 billion, gross margins around 37 percent and a $145 billion checking account. Meanwhile, mobile local search — though it’s dear our hearts — has annual revenues of $1.3 billion, growing to $5.6 billion by 2017 according to BIA/Kelsey projections.
The bottom line is that local search is on Apple’s radar but let’s be sure to call it what it is: a revenue diversification play. This stems from maturing iPhone sales and a stock price that reflects it. New penetration is to be had with a lower-priced “iPhone 5C” in high-growth developing markets, but Apple will need other growth areas to justify its massive valuation.
Locationary Apple
That’s where mobile local search could come into the picture, but for now it’s almost a rounding error for a company like Apple. The numbers point more towards to the need for a better mapping engine to protect sales of massively profitable iThings first and foremost. This is pressured further by an increasingly competitive SamDroid to the East.
One thing is for sure: Apple has lots of ground to cover if it’s to continue to buy the equivalent lead time of local search and navigation data that Google has amassed and put to work over the past 8 years. The company’s local search and mapping acquisition spree isn’t over: good news if you’re in the local mapping and data game.
Locationary Apple Orchards
Mike Boland is senior analyst at BIA/Kelsey, where he heads up the firm’s mobile local coverage. Previously, he was a tech journalist for Forbes, Red Herring, Business 2.0, and other outlets.
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Locationary Apple Picking
You could argue Apple Maps’ lackluster debut last year had as much to do with our tendency to focus on sexy outlier goofs, as if those alone were sufficient evidence the app was problem-riddled. There’s no science behind that position, but the sensational resonates, and it’s eye-catching to learn that an industry darling like Apple might have crafted an app that embarrassingly confused, for instance, London, Ontario with London, England, or the lofty Willis (nee Sears) Tower in Chicago — the second tallest building in the U.S. — with a comparably stubby skyscraper dwarfed by its peers. Were those errors pathological? Who could say.
Even I succumbed to the “where there’s smoke there’s fire” mindset at first, switching to Google Maps via the iOS version of Chrome, then to Google’s standalone iOS Maps app released back in December to the tech-blog equivalent of trumpets, confetti and angels singing hosannas. When an app triggered Apple Maps, I killed it. I learned to work around Apple’s hooks, manually typing addresses into Google Maps instead of Safari, sacrificing the luxury of Apple’s seamless inline app connections for what I assumed was Google Maps’ greater fidelity.
But my experience over time has veered from popular sentiment. Google Maps was getting addresses wrong and dropping the GPS pin down on the road behind a business or on the wrong side of the street. In fact I started noticing the app was getting basic locations wrong roughly as often as Apple Maps does.
To be fair, neither Maps screws up most of the time: both take me from A to Z reliably, whether Z’s a business, a residence or some backwoods state park hangout. But whether Apple’s quiet refinements are paying dividends or we’ve been wrong about the app’s shortcomings (or Google Maps’ superiority) from the start — all I have is anecdotal evidence — I’ve slowly gravitated back to using Apple Maps as my primary locational tool.
So when I read that Apple had snatched up Canadian data startup Locationary, it struck me as less a reactionary maneuver to shore up deficiencies in a still-ailing application than a progressive, aggregative one designed to distinguish Apple Maps from the crowd.
The mapping software industry’s holy-holy isn’t cartographical fidelity (already on offer), it’s figuring out how to fold in detailed, accurate, and — most important of all — always up-to-date information about the locations you’re searching for (or near, or topically about). The future of maps, among other whiz-bang features like three-dimensional, real-time verisimilitude, is their becoming semantically sophisticated extensions of our inquiries, not — as Apple and Google Maps both currently work — the other way around, conjuring results, then handing us off to subordinates like Yelp and the like for evaluative drill-down.
Apple Locations
Locationary, a portmanteau of location and dictionary, touts its “Saturn” platform as a way to synthesize and refine business profiles, taking component data from multiple sources (crowd-sourced, business-provided) and restructuring it as composite information — in other words, making sure business profiles are representative and up-to-date. The company describes its platform as using “a revolutionary real-time blending technology that can merge data from multiple sources as quickly as you can download it.” Think of it as another shot at a “neutral” connection hub, like LinkedIn for contact management, say, designed to unify disparate profile-building processes.
Mapping software is already complex enough without branching into far trickier services that intermingle locational and contextual information. We’re vectoring toward the sort of eerie moment you see in a movie like Minority Report, when Tom Cruise walks by those marketplace displays that react to him uniquely, hawking this or that service based on his profile in some aggregative system, but it’ll take a paradigm shift in profile administration to get us there.
Locationary Apple Crisp
The actual future is probably more private, of course: tiny screens that fit in our pockets and hands or that perch above our eyes, Google Glass-style. As Locationary CEO Grant Ritchie put it to The Globe and Mail a year ago: “In 10 years from now, our mobile phones are going to know everything being sold around us — what’s on sale and where, how much it costs, what’s available in stock and where.”
But to get there, you have to do far better than manually phoning businesses to verify their information (as Ritchie claims Google’s been doing with Google Maps). If Locationary lives up to its claims then, and Apple’s at some point able to launch a version of Apple Maps that offers accurate, comprehensive, contextually meaningful locational information, it may indeed have something unprecedented to crow about.
