Among Apple's many acquisitions in 2013, two might have previously gone unreported - location data company BroadMap, and smart note-taking app, Catch. Mark Gurman has done some solid reporting here, combining sources with LinkedIn listings, and discovered that many former employees of both companies now call Apple home. From 9to5Mac:
According to their LinkedIn profiles, Jesse Sheridan, Brian Scaffidi, Mark Newcomb, and Kris Rousseau are either managers or engineers for Apple’s mapping software. They all say they joined Apple in either March or April. We have also discovered several other former BroadMap employees working at Apple that were not on BroadMap’s executive team. It does not appear that the CEO joined the other executives at Apple. BroadMap employees did not respond to requests for comment, and Apple did not respond to a request for comment regarding BroadMap.
And:
While Catch being acquired following promotion from Apple does not exactly indicate that Apple is the buyer, we have heard from multiple sources that the majority of Catch employees are now working for Apple. The sources say that the former list of Catch employees, which even includes co-founder Andreas Schobel, are working on iOS-related software.
Nothing is official until Apple PR issues their "from time to time" boilerplate, but Apple is still suffering from the poor job they did aggregating, cleansing, and sanitizing location data for the iOS 6 Maps app, so the more location smarts they can throw at it the better. Likewise, both Notes and Reminders got the short ends of the iOS 7 makeover stick, so the more talent and technology there, the better.
Gurman is also reporting that previous acquisitions Cue and Topsy will be used to enhance Siri over the next few years. Read his full story via the link below and then let me know - do you think these acquisitions make sense?
Source: 9to5Mac
Update: Apple has now provided the usual boilerplate in a statement to Ina Fried for AllThingsD:
Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.
