Rumourmodo: Apple Using Retail Store Employees To Fix Maps?

Rumourmodo: Apple Using Retail Store Employees To Fix Maps?


MacRumors claims that Apple is “turning to select Retail Store employees to help improve Maps for iOS 6”. What a genius idea!

The rumour site says that multiple sources “indicated that participating stores will dedicate 40 hours of staff time per week, distributed among a number of employees, to manually examine Apple’s mapping data in their areas and submit corrections and improvements.”

They don’t provide any more details except that one of the employees will be designated “a subject matter expert to oversee the team and receiving training on how the team will operate”. A Maps Genius, folks.

How effective can this be? And how would this fix Maps’ biggest fault — its crappy search engine? It’s dumber than a cobblestone. The other day a friend asked for restaurants while driving across Hollywood, Florida, and it showed restaurants of Hollywood, California — over the map of Hollywood, Florida.

But perhaps there’s no other way to improve the maps except to manually fix the database. I was thinking that Apple should buy Garmin, but according to our own Maps Genius Kyle Wagner, Garmin uses Teleatlas, which TomTom owns. And Apple uses TomTom already, so that wouldn’t work. [ MacRumors ]


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