Apple buys Poly9

Apple could be upping the ante in its battle with Google as the company reportedly purchased Poly9, a mapping company based in Canada.

AppleInsider on Wednesday cited a report from French-Canadian news site cyberpresse.ca saying that Apple bought the company and has already moved the majority of workers to California. While many companies that get purchased post a note to their Web site, Poly9's site appears to be offline this morning.

Apple representatives were not immediately available to confirm the purchase when contacted by CNET.

Poly9 has worked with some big organizations in the past including Microsoft, Yahoo, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), and MSNBC. While there is no clear indication what Apple will do with the technology, a demo of the Poly9 Globe is still available on Skype.

Poly9 would be the second mapping company Apple purchased in the past 10 months. In October, Apple purchased Placebase, a company that produced a maps application programming interface called Pushpin and offered a mapping service much like Google Maps.

Both products could easily compete with Google Maps and Google Earth, products that are available for the Mac,iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. While Google and Apple compete in the mobile market now, Google has remained the default search engine and mapping application for Apple products.