Eric Slivka, writing for MacRumors:
In one of its latest efforts to bolster its mapping capabilities, Apple appears to have acquired Coherent Navigation, a Bay Area GPS-related firm founded in 2008 by engineers from Stanford and Cornell.
One of Coherent Navigation’s areas of focus was High Integrity GPS (“iGPS”), a system that combines signals from the traditional mid-earth orbit GPS satellites with those from the low-earth satellites of voice and data provider Iridium to offer greater accuracy and precision, higher signal integrity, and greater jam resistance. Iridium touts iGPS as having the potential to provide location information accurate to within centimeters.
That “appears to have” was converted to “confirmed” in this New York Times article:
To that end, Apple confirmed on Sunday that it had purchased Coherent Navigation, a Bay Area global positioning company, further bolstering Apple’s location technology and services.
“Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans,” the company said in an email.
Not sure how that quote is a confirmation. Perhaps there was more to the email. But the founders now appear to be Apple employees, so it really does seem like a done deal.
“Apple buys smaller technology companies…” is Apple’s standard confirmation of acquisitions. See: MusicMetric, LinX, Topsy, etc. It’s their confirmation every single time they buy something small and someone asks about it.
iJDAM to be announced at WWDC 2016.
What would their response be if asked about a company they did NOT – and had no plans to – acquire?
Generally speaking? They say nothing at all. They don’t deny it and they don’t say their standard “Apple buys..” line, either.
Good to know. MacRumors often uses the invocation of the “Apple buys…” response as confirmation. I’ve always wondered how they were able to make that claim. Thanks for the response.