Apple have very quietly purchased an online mapping company, Placebase.

The news was only confirmed recently but speculation is now growing that this indicates a desire by Apple to reduce its reliance on Google services including of course Google maps.

The former Placebase CEO is now on-board with Apple in the ‘Geo Team as his Linked-In profile confirms.

There are clear commercial reasons why apple would want to bring a mapping company into their portfolio. iPhoto has geotagging support using Google Maps and the iPhone/iPod Touch of course both use Google Map data.

With mapping experience in the family we may possibly see more map enabled functionality in Apple but of course, buying a small online mapping company does not give you access to world-wide map data so Apple have some way to go before we will see ‘Maps by Apple’ in the copyright.

Navigon MobileNavigator

This release adds Text-To-Speech and iPod controls as well as some other minor changes. The Text To Speech allows the road names to be included in the navigation instructions giving the driver more confidence in the manoeuvre they are making. The iPod controls are also a very welcome feature as previously although you could set the iPod playing in the background if the playlist or album ended then you had to exit the Navigation application to change the music.

Also included in this release are: Location sharing, and automatic day/night mode switching.

The full Navigon Press Release follows:
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We all knew it was coming but ‘when?’ was the $64million question. Spotted in the New Zealand iTunes App Store yesterday it seemed pretty clear that the launch had begun and at some time early this morning TomTom for iPhone finally materialised in the UK AppStore.

There isn’t a lot to add really, the interface looks very similar to that which was used on the TomTom Mobile App that used to exist and it features multi-touch integration making full use of iPhone gestures for operation and map zoom etc.

Navigation to address book contacts is also included as well as IQ routing. But notable by its omission is any form of LIVE connected services. This is a phone, a phone with out of the box data bundles and connectivity so why the heck has the opportunity to bundle the LIVE service features been omitted?

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ALK’s CoPilot Live app for iPhone has hit the UK Appstore.

The feature list includes turn-by-turn voice directions, UK & Ireland maps data, full UK post codes and 2D/3D map data.

Additional features include ‘LiveLink’ location sharing and messaging, 5-day weather forecast and lane indicator and clearturn displays.

Best of all, ALK have matched the price of CoPilot in the Android Market store, at £25.99 it’s very reasonable.  So reasonable that as I’ve a long drive ahead of me later today I’ve gone and bought it.