Apple has purchased a small company called Locationary.
Locationary maintains a database, called Saturn, of business names, locations, and details. The information is crowd-sourced, which means it is kept up-to-date, and can be used to verify the accuracy of mapping data.
Apple did not disclose a purchase price for the company, nor what it plans to do with it, but AllThingsD reports that Apple will add both Locationary’s database and engineers to is mapping team. Apple launched its own mapping product with iOS 6 last year and the map data was riddled with inaccuracies.
Apple issued an apology over the app and redirected iOS device users to other navigation apps with the promise that it would improve Apple Maps over time
