Michal Marek Apple has made another personnel acquisition falling into the maps sector, and it appears to have acquired an important reinforcement. Torsten Krenz, the former head of the mapping division of Nokia HERE and NAVTEQ, headed to the Californian company. Original unofficial sources soon confirmed and Krenz himself on LinkedIn.
Krenz has been in the field of mapping for quite some time. He served as head of global expansion at NAVTEQ, and after that company was bought by Nokia and merged with its own HERE mapping division, Krenz moved on. He then apparently acted as the coordinator of global operations at HERE and was directly responsible for the worldwide mapping process.
The arrival of Krenz to the Apple team could therefore be very interesting for the future of Apple Maps. Although Apple continues to collect new and new data and map more territories, the quality of its map materials is still far from 100%. Although it's been two years since Apple replaced Google's maps in iOS with its own solution, many people are still complaining about the quality of the native map application.
Krenz is not the only reinforcement, Apple is constantly hiring new members for the map division, so a former Amazon employee, Benoit Dupin, who focused on search technology in his original job, also came to Cupertino this year. So at Apple, the man is probably expected to help improve Maps search.
In iOS 8, Apple has other big plans for Maps. It wants to add new functions to them, such as indoor navigation, and at the same time significantly improve the quality and availability of maps in China. Another allegedly planned function was to be navigation in cities with the possibility of using public transport. However, the integration of timetables into the application has been delayed and will probably not be available by the time iOS 8 is released in the fall of this year.
This delay was allegedly caused by the forced restructuring of Apple's map division, which was accompanied by, for example, the departure of Cathy Edwards, co-founder of the startup chomp, This woman was one of the team leaders at the time of her dismissal and was directly responsible for the quality of Maps. The aforementioned Benoit Dupin from Amazon then took over her role.
I would be interested in the strategy, the solution to the problem. Are there no quality materials for maps? After all, every somewhat decent navigation system has them. Do they only make repairs according to user references? It will be for decades…
So far it looks like they are also doing satellite imagery based on user references. So I hope that soon there will be as many tourists as possible on the ISS. :-)