Apple should acquire Foursquare to compete at the Maps API level.<p>Apple Maps uses Yelp for venue and Point Of Interest search. I'm in Vancouver and Yelp is OK but not great here. I'm told it's worse in places like Europe.<p>On the other hand, Foursquare's venue and POI search is very good. There API is one of the best in the business. Their core API is great. They have a really good real-time & push API. The way that Aspects & Actions are designed for each of the Endpoints is very good, too.
<a href="https://developer.foursquare.com/docs/" rel="nofollow">https://developer.foursquare.com/docs/</a><p>On top of this, Foursquare is a Scala/JVM shop. Apple is a Java/JVM shop. (And they may still be using the WebObjects for some older services.) Apple would get the added benefit of migrating to a modern stack and getting a really good technical team.<p>Modernizing their stack and modernizing their web APIs would go a long way in fixing the "Apple doesn't get web services" problem.
If Apple wants to compete in cloud services like mapping, they should publish a REST API for web apps as well. If I was developing a local search app for mobile and web, I imagine I'd want to use the same data provider on both platforms.