"Apple Reportedly Hiring Dozens of New Mapping Experts and Engineers" (AAPL)

It's autonomous vehicles.
The augmented reality stuff is coming—and definitely faster than Virtual Reality—but the need for mapping in the autonomous world is the reason the GOOG had a head start in driverless vehicles.
In the summer of 2015 we were posting headline such as:

• Uber Bids for Nokia Maps Service to Lessen Google Reliance
• Why Three German Carmakers Will Pay $3 Billion for Nokia's Mapping Service

Uber ended up buying Microsoft's mapping technology and talent after the Germans took the Nokia business. They also bought the company that powers GM's OnStar called deCarta.

Here's the latest via SearchEngineLand:

Apple Maps could be the beneficiary of the company's push into augmented reality and 'autonomous systems.'

According to a CNBC report, Apple is on a hiring spree. The company is seeking to add scores of mapping experts and engineers. According to the report:

More than 70 job listings went live in the past month on the company’s site relating to its maps team, or requiring skills around things like: “geospatial information services,” “navigational aids” and “fleet management.”

Apple Maps, which has quietly been improving over time, still suffers from a less-than-stellar reputation from its botched launch in 2012. However, the new hires will be supporting initiatives around augmented reality and “autonomous systems.”

Here’s what Apple CEO Tim Cook said about both topics during this week’s earnings call.

On augmented reality: 

One of the most exciting and most promising announcements from WWDC was the introduction of ARKit, a new set of tools for developers to create augmented reality apps. It’s still early in the beta period, but it’s clear that ARKit has captured the imagination of our developer community . . .

We believe AR has broad mainstream applicability across education, entertainment, interactive gaming, enterprise, and categories we probably haven’t even thought of. With hundreds of millions of people actively using iPhone and iPad today, iOS will become the world’s biggest augmented reality platform as soon as iOS 11 ships.

On autonomous systems: 

In terms of autonomous systems, what we’ve said is that we are very focused on autonomous systems from a core technology point of view. We do have a large project going and are making a big investment in this. From our point of view, autonomy is the mother of all AI projects. And the autonomous systems can be used in a variety of ways and a vehicle is only one. But there are many different areas of it and I don’t want to go any further with that.

Autonomous vehicles require a top-tier mapping and navigation capability — for obvious reasons....MORE