Apple acquires map purveyor Placebase

MacRumors discovered that Apple quietly acquired mapping service Placebase back in July. Placebase CEO Jaron Waldman's updated LinkedIn profile now lists him on the "Geo Team" at Apple.

So what's Apple's interest in a mapping company? The obvious guess would be as a replacement for the Google Maps application that is installed by default on all iPhones. In May 2008 GigaOm reported on several ways that Placebase is better than Google Maps:

One, by offering customizations and tons of features that integrated private and public data sets in many diverse ways. (He knew it would be a while before Google would get around to offering customization). His other twist was to offer a way to layer commercial and other data sets (such as demographics and crime data) onto the maps using an easy-to-use application programming interface (API). The product is called PushPin.

Computerworld's Seth Weintraub linked to a video of Placebase CEO Jaron Waldman demoing his product at an O'Reilly conference last year.

A good example of the software in use is http://policymap.org.  Like Openplaces, Policy Map uses the Pushpin API that Apple purchased as the underlying technology in its mapping product.  As you can see there are a dizzying amount of layers involved, much more than Google, Microsoft and Yahoo can offer in their mapping software.

What's your conspiracy theory? Are Apple and Google on the outs?