Report: Apple Buys Spotsetter, a Location Recommendation App (mashable.com)

IMAGE: MASHABLE, CHRISTINA ASCANI

BY SETH FIEGERMANJUN 06, 2014

Apple has reportedly made another acquisition that could help improve its mapping service.

TechCrunch reports that Apple has acquired Spotsetter, a small startup that was founded in 2011 and developed an app for recommending places and activities to users based in part on their friends' activity. Terms of the deal were not included, but it reportedly closed last week.

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Apple did not immediately respond to our request for comment.

Spotsetter announced in a blog post last week that its app was shutting down. "We still have big dreams for personalized search for places and look forward to seeing great progress in this area," Johnny Lee, cofounder of Spotsetter, wrote in the post.

Both Lee and his cofounder Stephen Tse now list Apple as their current place of employment on their LinkedIn profiles. Tse had previously worked as a senior software engineer at Google where he was part of the Google Maps infrastructure team.

Apple has ramped up its number of acquisitions in recent years, picking up more than two dozen companies in the last year alone. Several of those acquisitions, including Hopstop, Locationary and Embark, were viewed as efforts to improve on its Maps product.