According to the Sun, Apple has purchased Quebec-based Poly9, a mapping API provider for Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo!, MSNBC, and NORAD.

Poly9’s website has been shuttered, their employees moved to Cupertino.

Last year, Apple bought PlaceBase, a company that specialized in API for layering data sets over maps.

Since there’s only a few companies that actually own the maps themselves, Apple still isn’t going into the map business — but they certainly look to be doing a lot to make their implementation of maps better and more powerful.

iOS 5 anyone?

[MacDailyNews, image via designrevolution.org, thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Apple acquires map API company Poly9 is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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Streaming music service Lala closed its virtual doors today. Acquired by Apple last year, rumors persist that Lala talent and technology will be a part of an upcoming iTunes.com service that moves Apple music, movie, and TV offerings to the cloud.

Recent leaks about an iPhone OS-powered Apple TV that would stream content directly from iTunes seem to play into these rumors, as do Apple’s huge data center being built in North Carolina and iTunes Preview, the new web-based front-end to iTunes media and app content.

Still, that might be the future, but as of today Lala is no more.

[Lala.com]

Streaming media service Lala goes bye-bye, will iTunes.com take its place? is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

Apple’s buying spree obviously didn’t stop with chip wizards Intricity — they’ve snapped up voice-powered personal assistant Siri as well.

The Siri iPhone app is currently still available in the US App Store [free - iTunes link]. No guarantees on how long that will last. What makes Siri so interesting is how they integrate a number of API together (including OpenTable, TaxiMagic, MovieTikets.com, Rotten Tomatoes, WeatherBug, Yahoo Local, Yahoo Boss, StubHub, Bing, Eventful Freebase, Citysearch, AllMenus.com, Gayot, and Wolfram Alpha) and combine Nuance’s voice recognition technology with their own, DARPA-funded server backend. All this comes togeter to provide a way to easily input and process a number of highly useful requests. As Robert Scoble puts it, you can talk to it and have it do everything from get you a taxi buy you movie tickets.

Apple included VoiceControl for phone dialing, music playing, and general accessibility with iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3.0, but Google has raised the bar with ubiquitous OS integration starting with the Nexus One.

System-wide Siri might not just close that gap, but leapfrog it.

[FTC via Scobleizer and TechCrunch, thanks Fassy for the tip]

Apple buys Siri voice-powered personal assistant is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

Since Apple currently dominates the mobile app space, bolstering their cut of profits with a cut of in-app advertising is likely good business for them. It’s all about the eyeballs, and if those eyeballs are locked on iPhones and iPod touches, why let Google gobble it all up?

If rumors are true that Google bought AdMob out from under Apple (much like Apple bought online music streamer Lala out from under Google), then switching targets to an AdMob competitor couldn’t have been entirely off the radar, now could it? (Especially with — yes more rumors — of Google now turning towards Spotify for their music fix).

Apple and Google certainly look to be getting even more up into each others business, and that should make the expected Nexus One announcement later today, along with Apple’s expected January 27 event, and the whole of 2010, a lot more exciting!