Apple had purchased its own mapping company, Placebase, in July 2009. The company has not launched any new product or service in the market as part of their acquisition. But still Placebase offers service, which is similar to Google Maps.

Jaron Waldman, Placebase’s founder and CEO, is now working for Apple, and is member of Apple’s GEO Team. This indicates that Apple is looking for its own mapping software to replace Google Maps on the iPhone and Mac OS X in the near future.

Now, it’s going to be quite interesting to see whether Apple can successfully replace Google Maps or not. According to GigaOm, Placebase has more advanced features than that of Google Maps, such as customization and the ability to layer multiple data sets onto maps.

At present, Google offers the default Map application on the iPhone.