The deal and its terms were never announced and Apple has not confirmed it. But Computerworld notes a summer tweet from a Placebase customer claiming the acquisition had been made in “hush-hush” fashion. The tweet also notes that Placebase founder and CEO Jaron Waldman’s LinkedIn profile now shows him as part of the “Geo Team” at Apple. And Placebase.com, which once touted the company’s Pushpin mapping platform has been taken offline.

Reached for comment, Apple (AAPL) declined to offer one–or to confirm that the acquisition has even taken place. But assuming there has been an acquisition–I know the evidence we’re dealing with here is circumstantial at best–this might explain the increasingly strained relationship between Apple and Google (GOOG), the Apple board’s Schmidt-ectomy and the Google Voice for iPhone debacle in which the companies offered two very different stories to explain the application’s rejection/delay from the App Store. If Apple has acquired Placebase, it could certainly use that company’s technology to replace Google Maps with an in-house mapping solution.

Of course, Apple might have something else in mind entirely–adding a new layer of customization to its current map offering, perhaps. After all, that was Placebase’s forte–enhancing maps with private and public data sets (demographics, crime data, etc.). In any event, we’ll never know unless Apple tells us, and right now, the company clearly has no intention of doing so.

First the company gave us CADIE (Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity), an “artificial intelligence” tasked-array system with the personality of a 12-year-old girl and accompanied by its own homepage, YouTube channel, blog, monograph and versions of Google Earth and Google Maps. And to these, Google has added Google LOLCODE, Google Brain Search, Google Chrome with 3-D and a new Gmail auto-reply feature. The search giant also announced a new upside-down viewing option for YouTube and an automatic red-eye function for Picasa.

Overkill? Maybe, just a little. Google (GOOG), of course, wasn’t alone in pumping the Web full of pranks. Seems people with Web sites everywhere fancy themselves Don Rickles today. Hotels.com began taking reservations for rooms on the Moon. And Expedia (EXPE) began offering flights to Mars. Microsoft (MSFT) renamed its Kumo search product Omuk and unveiled Alpine Legend for Xbox 360. Some angry librarians staged a Kindle burning in a Los Angeles park. Ashton Kutcher’s Katalyst Media appointed Gary Busey as Director of Human Resources. Torrent index The Pirate Bay partnered with the hopelessly litigious Warner Bros. The Guardian adopted an all-Twitter publishing model. Gizmodo was taken over by spam overlords. Amazon (AMZN) launched a brand new cloud-computing dirigible called Floating Amazon Cloud Environment, or FACE. Yahoo (YHOO) debuted an Ideological Search. And, finally, Qualcomm (QCOM) took convergence a bit too literally.

There are plenty of others, of course, far too many to mention here, and most of them unworthy of that mention in the first place. As Good Morning Silicon Valley aptly notes, “The sad fact is that pranks are like fireworks–once amateurs get to fiddling around with them, somebody’s going to end up lame.”

The first: iLife ‘09. iPhoto now offers a new feature called Faces, which categorizes photos by faces. The software uses a technology called “face detection” to ID the subjects of photos. It asks you to identify the subjects first and then scans the remainder of your photos; using face recognition, it identifies other photos in which those subjects appear.

Another new iPhoto feature: Places. It does the obvious. Using the GPS geotagging built into newer cameras and “the best cellphone in the world,” iPhoto identifies the location at which photos were taken and categorizes them accordingly. What about photos that don’t include those geotags? Manual entry solves that problem with a little help from Google Maps.

Apple has also added Facebook and Flickr support to iPhoto. Set up your accounts in iPhoto and the software will automatically send your photos to those services and allow your Facebook friends to tag them if you so choose. Beyond these features, iPhoto includes a slick new slideshow and book themes.

• Enhancements to Google Maps, including support for Google Street View, plus bus schedules and walking directions
• Support for over-the-air podcast updates via the iTunes Store
• An app-scoring feature that allows users to rate applications purchased from the the App Store before deleting them
• Support for line-in audio via the iPhone’s headphone jack

Wonderful additions to the platform, all of them. Of course, there are still quite a few missing. MMS support would be nice, wouldn’t it? As would support for Flash and the ability to compose messages in landscape mode.

And what about cut-and-paste? Seriously, at this point, it’s almost like Apple (AAPL) is purposely withholding it, out of spite.

Which is what Microsoft did today when it purchased Multimap for a reported $50 million. “The addition of Multimap enhances Microsoft’s position as a leading provider of mapping and location platform services,” Sharon Baylay, general manager of Microsoft’s Online Services Group, said in a statement. “This acquisition will play a significant role in the future growth of our search business and presents a huge opportunity to expand our platform business beyond the U.K. and globally.”

Leading provider of mapping and location platform services? That’s a bit of a stretch. According to Nielsen Online, Microsoft’s Windows Live Maps service had 7.1 million unique users worldwide during October. By comparison, Google Maps had 71.5 million unique users, its Earth service 22.7 million. Clearly, Microsoft is in a losing battle against Google in the mapping space, though this acquisition will give it a powerful weapon with which to fight.

To keep you abreast of tech news while he’s away, we’re compiling a daily digest of 10 must-read tech stories. Our Tech 10 appears below.

1. Bienvenue, iPhone: France Telecom has begun selling Apple’s cellphone at selected Orange stores in Paris and other cities. The device itself will cost about $1,106 with no plan attached, or 399 euros (about $590) with one of four “Orange for iPhone” plans, Computerworld notes, adding it will cost 100 euros ($148) to unlock the handset.
2. FCC Says ‘Uncle’: A proposal by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin to tightly regulate the cable TV industry has been “drastically” trimmed, reports the New York Times, which noted that Martin had sought more diverse programming and reduced cable costs.
3. Amazon: 1; Feds: 0. The federal government has lost its bid to compel Amazon to release details about the book-buying habits of thousands of its customers, according to Declan McCullogh on his blog, The Iconoclast. The Justice Department sought the information to prove its case against a former Madison, Wisc., city official accused of evading taxes in selling used books online.
4. Google, Online Snitch? The search colossus has voluntarily given the IP address of an Israeli blogger who used “Google Blogger” to allegedly slander municipal council members running for reelection, the Israeli Web site Globes Online reports, calling the move “unprecedented.”
5. YouTube, Censor? The popular video-sharing site has suspended the account of a well-known Egyptian anti-torture activist who posted videos of alleged brutality by a number of Egyptian policemen, Wael Abbas told Reuters, claiming that about 100 images he had sent were no longer available on YouTube.
6. But It Doesn’t Mind those CondéNet Vids: CondéNet is announcing today that it will distribute videos from its various consumer-interest Web sites via YouTube, The Wall Street Journal reports, adding that the deal is the latest in a series for Condé Nast Publications’ digital division.
7. LinkedIn Link to News Corp.? A “well-placed source” has told VentureBeat that News Corp. (owner of this site) is in talks to buy business-networking site LinkedIn. But LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye told Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky that “It would take a helluva lot” to get him to sell.
8. The Earth, Updated: Google Maps is updating its features, prompting Duncan Riley at TechCrunch to wonder if the new features won’t ultimately send Google Earth down the path of the dodo.
9. Feeling Insecure: Web applications and holes in Windows Office are the top concerns of Internet users, according to the annual security report by SANS, a computer training and security organization, in its Top 20 risk assessment for 2007.
10. How Green Is My Gaming? Greenpeace has released a report slamming Nintendo and Microsoft for making their video-game consoles with toxic chemicals, reports BusinessWeek, noting that the enviro group’s latest ranking of electronics firms this week also highlights questions over the environmental impact of the products and how much consumers care about them.

–posted by Associate Editor John Sullivan

In a press conference following Google Analyst Day, company Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founder Sergey Brin confirmed Google’s plans to bid in the FCC’s upcoming 700 MHz spectrum auction, but declined to discuss the mobile-phone strategy that might make use of it–apparently leaving that task to The Wall Street Journal.

According to a report in the publication today, Google will officially disclose its long-anticipated plans for Google-powered phones within the next two weeks. The devices will reportedly feature Google’s standard mobile applications (Maps, etc.) and more interestingly, a customized open-source operating system, which would allow third-party developers to build applications beyond those offered by Google. From the Journal:

The Google-powered phones are expected to wrap together several Google applications–among them, its search engine, Google Maps, YouTube and Gmail email–that have already made their way onto some mobile devices. The most radical element of the plan, though, is Google’s push to make the phones’ software ‘open’ right down to the operating system, the layer that controls applications and interacts with the hardware. That means independent software developers would get access to the tools they need to build additional phone features.

“Developers could, for instance, more easily create services that take advantage of users’ Global Positioning System location, contact lists and Web-browsing habits. They also would be able to interact with Google Maps and other Google applications. The idea is that a range of new social networking, mapping and other services would emerge, just as they have on the open, mostly unfettered Web. Google, meanwhile, could gather user data to show targeted ads to cellphone users.”

And don’t forget the mobile commerce element. Google-powered phones might even offer customers a way to pay for goods from vending machines and retailers via text message.

Anyway … The company has approached a number of handset makers and wireless operators about partnering in the effort, which it hopes to bring to market by the middle of 2008.

Previously:

• First Gphone Line Forms in New York Times Newsroom
• We Believe in One Godphone, the Handset Almighty …
• ‘We’re Not Doing a Mobile Phone’ Added to Norton Anthology of False Denials
• The Gphone: Exclusively From Sprint Nextel and Google?

I’ll give you a concrete example. I love Google Maps, use it on my computer, you know, in a browser. But when we were doing the iPhone, we thought, wouldn’t it be great to have maps on the iPhone? And so we called up Google and they’d done a few client apps in Java on some phones and they had an API that we worked with them a little on. And we ended up writing a client app for those APIs. They would provide the back-end service. And the app we were able to write, since we’re pretty reasonable at writing apps, blows away any Google Maps client. Just blows it away. Same set of data coming off the server, but the experience you have using it is unbelievable. It’s way better than the computer. And just in a completely different league than what they’d put on phones before.

“And, you know, that client is the result of a lot of technology on the client, that client application. So when we show it to them, they’re just blown away by how good it is. And you can’t do that stuff in a browser.

“So people are figuring out how to do more in a browser, how to get a persistent state of things when you’re disconnected from a browser, how do you actually run apps locally using, you know, apps written in those technologies so they can be pretty transparent, whether you’re connected or not.

“But it’s happening fairly slowly and there’s still a lot you can do with a rich client environment. At the same time, the hardware is progressing to where you can run a rich client environment on lower and lower-cost devices, on lower and lower-power devices. And so there’s some pretty cool things you can do with clients.”