Apple has acquired Spotsetter to improve its map service and offer users more personalized local recommendations.
Apple, one of the most prominent smartphone makers in the industry, has quietly snapped up Spotsetter, a personalized mapping service. The acquisition was first reported by TechCrunch Friday, though no further details of the deal have been revealed yet. The report adds that the deal is mainly to take over the technology used by the startup and the two talented founders.
The founders of Spotsetter have worked in major tech companies. Stephen Tse is an ex-Google Maps engineer and Johnny Lee worked as a former consultant at Siemens and CTO at FitFiend, a social network for fitness professionals, according to Business Insider.
The duo designed Spotsetter to combine trusted reviews with recommendations from friends and other data to develop a more personalized social map. The map also contained an interesting feature that showed users which of their friends were "experts" in making recommendations in a certain area. It uses an algorithm to pull personal content from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Foursquare, in order to tailor local recommendations. It made its debut during AngelPad's spring class in 2012. The startup was successful in raising $1.3 million in seed funding from Rahul Prakash, 2020 Ventures, Javelin Venture Partners in addition to AngelPad, according to CrunchBase.
Lee confirmed the acquisition indirectly with an emotional post on the company's official blog a week ago. He didn't reveal anything about Apple but said the company was closing down operations of the social networking application.
"With fondest emotions, I'm announcing that we are closing down Spotsetter app. We still have big dreams for personalized search for places and look forward to seeing great progress in this area. Thank you everyone for your support over the past years," Lee wrote.
TechCrunch also reported that Apple and Spotsetter had been discussing the deal for some time, but it was only that they closed the deal.
Apple has made quite a few big acquisitions of late. Recently, it acquired Beats Music for $3 billion, the company's highest paid acquisition in its history.
