Apple purchased the map company Placebase back in July, but no one even noticed until now. Back in July the CEO of Placebase, Fred Lalonde, announced via a tweet that Apple had purchased his company.

No one took him seriously until Computerworld started snooping around, only to find that Lalonde's LinkedIn profile had been updated from "CEO of Placebase" to "Geo Team at Apple" -- a position that seems to be new at our favorite fruit company. 

Placebase provided the same basic functionality that Google maps provides, but with a few differences: The maps could be layered with private or public data and commercial data could be layered using the Placebase's "easy-to-use" APIs. See the embedded video below where the CEO talks about the service at the O'Reilly Where 2.0 conference. 

Nobody seems to know what Apple is up to. Could it be to spite Google for the charades they played out a few weeks ago over Google Voice? It could be as simple as having people on-site that know what they're doing regarding maps, but we may never know.

via 9to5 Mac