With the number of GPS companies Apple has been scooping up in the last few years, Tim Cook may have a whopper of upgrade to announce for Apple Maps at the company's upcoming developers conference in June. The latest buy is Coherent Navigation, a technology startup that specializes in ultra-accurate GPS tracking. Apple confirmed the purchase on Sunday.
Based in San Mateo, Calif. and founded in 2008, Coherent Navigation is listed on LinkedIn as being part of the defence and aerospace industry, and according to reports it counts the U.S. Department of Defence among its clients. It appears to have under 10 employees.
The company focuses on so-called High-Integrity GPS or iGPS, according to MacRumors, which first reported the acquisition. This involves combining location signals from the low-earth orbit satellites operated by mobile satellite service Iridium, along with signals from U.S. Air Force-operated mid-earth GPS satellites.
The result, according to this 2009 press release from Iridium, is enhanced GPS tracking with more precise locations and fewer blocks in the signal. The service has the potential to provide GPS positioning data within “centimetres,” according to Iridium. Current standalone GPS provides data to within meters.
Apple confirmed the deal to the New York Times with its boilerplate statement on acquisitions, saying: “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.”
But Coherence is significant because it follows a string of acquisitions and acquihires by Apple in the field of GPS over the last couple of years, including Pin Drop, the crowdsourced location data company Locationary, and Broadmap.
Apple was widely expected to announce enhancements to Maps at last year's WWDC, but in the end it made no updates on the troubled service. Reports pointed to internal politics and missed deadlines.
At this year's developer's conference, where Apple is expected to release iOS 9, Apple is expected to finally roll out new features for Maps including transit directions. That follows Apple's 2013 acquisition of HopStop, a startup that made an app for navigating public transport.
Even before Apple Maps became the butt of jokes for its buggy features, Apple was willing to spend big to make its maps stand out.
In July 2011, a year before Maps launched, the company quietly dropped $250 million on Sweden’s C3 Technologies, a 20-person startup that focused on stereo vision for maps. Apple had made a point of buying the startup quickly so that it wouldn't go to Google, according to a source close to that deal.
C3 had previously done military contractual work that allowed drones to scan a landscape and instantly create a 3D map of the terrain. Under Apple the C3 team helped create the 3D rendering for Apple Maps, before moving out of Apple Maps to enhance the stereo vision capabilities of Apple’s mobile devices.
While Apple’s 3D rendered maps and FlyOver feature were neat to look at, the company didn’t put enough investment into the less-sexy infrastructure needed to make its maps more accurate and trustworthy.
As a result Apple Maps, which comes as standard on all iOS devices, has been widely criticized because of a litany of mapping errors and software bugs.
CEO Tim Cook admitted a few months after the service was launched in 2012 that Apple “screwed up. And we are putting the weight of the company behind correcting it.”
Since then Cook hasn't said much about Maps, but the acquisitions speak for themselves. Apple wants to up its game in mapping.
Already, Coherence is making its presence felt at Apple’s Maps division: former CEO Paul Lego is now listed on LinkedIn as working for Apple Maps, while co-founders Brent Ledvina and William Bencze have been working for Apple for the last two months.
Highly precise GPS navigation would be an attractive feature for the Apple Watch, which uses taptic feedback on the wrist to let wearers know whether to turn left or right on a street corner, so they don’t ever have to look at a screen. The watch “taps” the wrist twice for an upcoming right turn, and once for a left turn.
Early reviews of the watch suggest this more-intimate form of direction-giving does work, but it’ll be harder for mainstream consumers who are well aware of Apple’s limitations on mapping, to trust the company’s technology enough to not look at a screen.
A GPS service that pinpoints their location within centimetres might help change that.
