“As revealed in dozens of new job postings on its website, Apple is once again looking to improve its much-criticized Maps application by increasing the size of its team dedicated to verifying mapping data,” James Cull reports for MacRumors.
“The postings are for ‘ground truth’ local experts and regional managers in a number of different locations around the world, including several in the United States, Brazil, Japan, the United Arab Emirates and Europe,” Cull reports. “The roles call for someone with a bachelor’s degree or equivalent, prior experience in quality assurance and a ‘detailed knowledge of the unique features of your local area, including preferred place names, prominent businesses, public services, seasonal events, driving routes, landmarks, and road names.'”
Cull reports, “The company has acknowledged that it is working hard to improve its mapping services, which are coming to OS X Mavericks later this year. In just the past few weeks, Apple has been revealed to have acquired small mapping firms Locationary and HopStop as it seeks to improve its own services.”
Read more, including Apple’s job description, in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
Ahmad the cab driver may not have a B.A. or QA background, but he knows where everything is. And there’s an Ahmad in every city from Dubai to Seoul.
The FBI makes full use of that knowledge sis
You don’t have to hire people to do that. Just get the information from Google maps, Nokia and others. What they going to do….charge you for stealing information? How? ABC restaurant will be at the same location shown by other maps. Just add what’s missing.
It’s sad, really, that they continue to pursue this maps app that nobody I know uses. They had a moment last year to catch Google and they didn’t and so we all continue to use Google Maps and have the Apple app hidden from view on the last page of our phones. The thing is this: Google Maps has gotten even stronger since last year’s introduction of the Apple maps app. Apple would be better off forgetting about the DOA maps app and putting their energy toward making more than marginal bumps to their long-existing products. They’re seriously wasting time and money on trying to save face on maps. Let it go, Google irrefutably won that one. Even today, giving them one last chance, I’m in midtown Manhattan right now, and Apple’s map app just told me that I’m on 56th street when I’m very clearly 3 blocks south of there. It’s still a total mess and there’s no catching Google on this. Save your energy and just make a better phone that’s not yet another iteration of the iPhone 4 from 3 years ago. Thank you.
Hey Jack Ass!,
Your beloved google maps wouldn’t be what it is today without Apple maps forcing it to improve.
Apple is expected to be perfect and google’s expectations are nonexistent.
Hence, the “Perpetual Beta” moniker.
Boy, you’re pretty short-sighted. GPS Maps will be integrated into mobile devices from now on. (aka: forever) Anointing Google as the victor is very premature. You don’t think that Apple can make huge improvements to Maps within the next 2 years? 5 years? Yes, Google will continue to upgrade as well, that’s understood. But sooner or later — Apple will arrive at feature parity and that is a fact. And will more than likely improve upon anything Google has created. If you ran Apple, you would have just thrown in the towel after year one. Good thing you weren’t running Apple in 1990.
Exactly! People forget, that when iOS for the car is in production the Maps app will be huge. Apple knows what the Heck they are doing.
Only a stubborn person refuses to admit when somebody else is better at something. It is OBVIOUS Google is better at mail and maps. Apple is OBVIOUSLY better at hardware and a seamless user experience. The fight between them is ridiculous and the only reason that Apple is using resources to make their own maps app is because of the Android fight. If I ran Apple I’d direct my company’s energy toward the things that we do best and integrate other company’s apps to make the best user experience. Nothing short-sighted about it. They are wasting time and money. What you’re saying is that Apple never fails to follow through and make everything they ever work on the best ever and that is simply not the case. They are pouring money into something that most people will never use. It’s like them trying to get into social networking via iTunes because they couldn’t make it a deal with Facebook. I don’t know a single person who uses that network on iTunes, not one. And that goes for Google trying their hand at beating Facebook with G+. They failed and that’s it, move on to a new idea. There’s only so much patience and room people have for certain applications and trying to beat or catch Google will only result in minimal returns. Nobody is buying an iPhone because it has Apple Maps. But tell me my phone can’t use Google maps and it’s a deal breaker.
The term “Better” is subjective in this case. Apple maps to me is better. It looks sweet, it’s fast as heck at rendering, caches more info than google maps, voice navigation hasn’t steered me wrong yet.
I mean, what do you do when google maps gives you the wrong info? Let me guess, you shrug it off because after all, it’s google, and you are just one of their perpetual beta testers. Or you just say, “Well, I’m sure they’ll fix it soon, mapping the planet is a big job. Their bound to misstep on some occasions.”
To each his own dude. Apple maps is better to me because it’s not operated by a data-mining bedfellow of the NSA.
There are some people who have criticised Apple maps to such an extent that those who have never used it assume that it’s really bad. I know a lot of people who are new to iPhones or iPads who were expecting the map app to be dreadful and when they try it for themselves, they report that it’s absolutely brilliant. They find it hard to reconcile the difference between what they were told about it with what they actually experience.
For my part, Apple maps has had no trouble displacing Google maps and I use it daily without issues. I have often encountered errors on Google maps or my TomTom sat nav and am still waiting to find my first Apple maps error.
I use Maps and like it very much. It has never given me false results during GPS style navigation. In fact, it correctly identified two locations that Google has been getting wrong for the last 4 years of trying.
I do hope they have a local ground truth engineer in the LAX area soon. One of the major airports in the world and there are problems. Yet, they continue to show up, even after numerous corrections. This is both Google and Apple maps. I perfer to have Apple nail down the problems and not ever snooping Google.
Just got a call from Apple today verifying the location of our school. Maps originally showed it two blocks away from its location. Submitted a correction and it eventually showed up in the right location. They were just following up to make sure it was now correct.
Good. It’s about time. What took so long?
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