It has been a big week for Apple, which has had news breaking about it left and right. The latest has to do with its acquisition of two new app developers, Catch, a note-taking app similar to Evernote and BroadMap.
According to reports discovered by 9To5Mac, Catch was acquired back in July. BroadMap's acquisiton seems a bit more interesting as the company says it still exists and operates separately from Apple, despite most of its staff having moved to Apple based on updates to their LinkedIn profiles.
"BroadMap is a comprehensive and expansive mapping firm with several different products and services. While the other Apple maps-related acquisitions this year focused on transit and indoor mapping capabilities, which wil likely be integrated into iOS 8, BroadMap's expertise is managing, sorting and analyzing mapping data," writes 9To5Mac in its description of the sale.
According to its website, BroadMap's experience is in sorting data, cartography, points of interest, enterprise integration, geocoding, web development and mobile application development. The technology that comes with this acquisition would go a long way toward Apple's plan to make Apple Maps a viable option for navigation on iPhones in the future.
TechCrunch reports that at least seven former BroadMap employees now list Apple as their employer on LinkedIn and all departed the company around the same time in March of 2013. It's unclear at this time if Apple actually acquired the whole company or just key talent, which would be out of character for the company.
The company has yet to comment on the issue as it typically gives the same response in these situations saying that it purchases smaller companies all the time and does not comment on such purchases.
TechCrunch notes that BroadMap had a number of longer-term existing contracts in place with clients that would have made termination of those deals expensive and difficult for both Apple and BroadMap. However, this is just a theory at this point as nothing has been confirmed by either party.