Apple aims to make proprietary map service is a serious competitor to the market leader Google Maps, as well as strong local players such as Yandex.Map. Before it became known about purchase a California company developer of navigation solutions.
The New York Times reported that Apple had become the owners of the company Coherent Navigation, the headquarters of which is located in San Francisco, USA. The amount of the deal remains secret, and Apple traditionally has refrained from commenting about the absorption.
Coherent Navigation was founded in 2008 by people from Stanford and Cornell universities. The company specializes in the development of hardware and software that is built on highly integrated GPS systems. The latter receives the signal from traditional near-earth satellites used in many GPS-navigators, as well as from low-orbit satellites. Due to this, the system determines the location much better than the system used in the gadgets to be used by the General public.
Coherent Navigation actively cooperates with the largest operators of satellite networks and other companies in the industry, including Boeing and Iridium. She was also a contractor for the defense Department.
Key project Coherent is a GPS Navigation system High Integrity – “iGPS”. It combines the signals from the satellites, flying at low and medium earth orbit. The result of this approach is the significantly improved accuracy and quality of satellite navigation. Because of this positioning system, created Coherent, possess the high noise immunity and can determine the location of an object with a precision of several centimeters. The use of iGPS technology enables the capture location in just a few seconds compared to 40 seconds at a traditional GPS. Technology integration in electronic devices can effectively determine the geolocation coordinates even under difficult conditions: near tall buildings, forest, gorge, ravine, and even in rooms.
Official website Coherent Navigation is closed, and officials have updated their profiles on LinkedIn. So, CEO Paul LEGO said that is part of the Apple Maps team, and a co-founder William Benz and Brett Ledvina received the post of engineers for navigation.
For the California giant is not the first purchase to improve their own map service. Earlier in the IT giant has included such developers navigation solutions, as Pin Drop, Locationary, WifiSLAM, Hopstop, Embark and Broadmap. Experts believe that in the case of Coherent absorption Navigation it’s not just about “buying talent”, but also the interest that the iPhone maker in the development of a startup.
The announcement of the new features of the Apple Maps service is expected at the June WWDC 2015.
