Apple Buys Mapping Firm Poly9

A Google-translated report by the French version of The Sun reveals that Apple continues to gather talented minds for yet unconfirmed developments. The company’s latest acquisition is that of Quebec-based high-tech company Poly9, a mapping firm. Under the terms of the acquisition, the majority of Poly9’s employees were immediately moved to California.

According to French-language The Sun, Poly9 has given birth to programming interfaces for several large clients, including Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, MSNBC and NORAD, in recent years. To give birth to its applications, Poly9 relied on the base maps of Google Earth, Google Maps, MapQuest, of Platial, Urban Mapping and many others’, according to the report. Since the acquisition, most of its employees left Quebec and settled in offices located in Silicon Valley. The only two employees not following Poly9 (for family reasons) have remained in Quebec to continue working on their own.

Although there is still an address assigned to Poly9 in Québec (Saint-Jean-Baptiste), it has been revealed that the company’s headquarters, located on Rue Saint-Joseph, were closed a few weeks back. None of the staffers formerly employed by Poly9 were available for comment on the acquisition, with one of the employees saying they have signed confidentiality agreements.

As of now, Poly9’s web site is down (downright blank, actually), in what is a normal move following an acquisition, although not necessarily an imposed one. The full Sun report, available via Google French-English translation, can be found here.

Poly9 handled design and development of online mapping applications, including cross-browser web maps using Live Local Search, Google Maps, MapQuest OpenAPI, and Yahoo! Maps. Example applications include asset tracking, real estate property listings, rich multimedia integration, public transportation, and entertainment.

As noted above, aside from developing online and offline 3D mapping applications, Poly9 also created mapping APIs, which provided web services that were ready to mashup with other Web 2.0 applications, as well as implementation of processes that fostered collaboration & innovation.