Apple Inc. has focused on data that few people think is important. According to Apple Inc., the world of tomorrow shall need smart devices that can help in navigation between places and help them locate important facilities such as petrol stations, restaurants and guest houses. Apple Inc. has, given the above, focused on gathering data and analysing it with a view of making this navigation on their smart devices as easy and as intuitive as possible (Rossio, et al. 2013). This navigation data is so important to Apple Inc. that in just the last three years, the company has bought three start-up companies that specialize in mapping and analysis of customer location data with a view to integrating it into the smart devices that it produces. Between 2013 and 2015, Apple acquired Hopstop, Coherent Navigation and Mapsense, all of which are companies with a specialisation in mapping of data.
Apple Inc. envisions overhauling the navigation of directions as enjoyed today on smartphones and tablets. Apple Inc. has established that in future, people shall need greater ease of navigation to track goods and people on transit for supervisory and also for security reasons. The company has already integrated transit data to its Maps and Siri apps. The two apps help one to navigate and search for important directions and locate important facilities such as restaurants and petrol stations (Matamala. Et al, 2015). The vision by Apple Inc. is to have every location and major facilities in the world on their data base. To do this, the company already has engines around the world mapping streets and places for easier integration into their navigation apps such as Siri and Maps.
The acquisition of the three start-up companies among others by Apple Inc. is informed by the ability of the companies to produce software and hardware that can accurately produce data for use in Geographical Positioning Systems, GPS (Bierlaire, Chen & Newman 2013). Through them, Apple is able to gather cloud sourced map data for both locations and items on transit. All this is data Apple Inc. thinks as important for various reasons. The reasons range from their own data mining when, for example, conducting market research for new products or for security reasons, as well as for after sale services and client follow ups.
References
Bierlaire, M., Chen, J., & Newman, J. (2013). A probabilistic map matching method for smartphone GPS data. Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, 26, 78-98.
Matamala, L. A. S., Huang, R. K., Herz, S., & Shimada, T. (2015). U.S. Patent No. 9,195,721. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Rossio, S. B., Wiklund, C. S., Dannenbring, A. J., Van Rooij, E., & Srivastava, D. (2013). U.S. Patent No. 8,370,060. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
