Apple Purchased 3D Mapping Company C3 Earlier this Year

With the recent passing of Steve Jobs, “innovator” has been a title thrown around a lot. It’s for good reason, as Steve was one of the best. As of late, however, it seems that most of what’s truly interesting or intriguing to come out of Apple has been the result of acquisitions. Take Siri, the advanced voice recognition and response system released this month for the iPhone 4S, for example.

Such fruits from acquisitions are not set to slow down, with it being revealed that Apple was the purchaser of C3, developers of advanced 3D mapping technologies, earlier this year. Unlike Google Earth (and Maps), that offers a 3D option to get a better perspective of the world you’re looking at, C3 offers technology that stitches together many different images and creates a very convincing rotatable 3D environment out of them.

While a service like Google Maps or Mapquest might be able to give you a general idea of what a neighborhood looks like and can give you directions to your destination, C3’s 3D map environments are in a league of their own, giving you the best possible view and understanding of a location.

It’s of course quite obvious why Apple would want this piece of the mapping pie. Google Maps is used in current versions of iOS, and if Apple can move away from the big G, then it will happen. And what better way to do it than to rub salt in your competitor’s wound on the way out? C3 is unparalleled in what it does (for now), so it wouldn’t be surprising to see it brought to the iPhone and similar devices in the near-future.

Thanks to MacMan for sending us this news!