Per usual , it seems as if this deal has happened in the dark of the night, but thankfully for the curious among us, it's a bit difficult to disguise a caravan of humans escaping Québec and fleeing to Cupertino. According to a report inas well as an independent confirmation on our end, Apple has picked up a small Canadian firm by the name of Poly9. As of now, every last employee has been relocated to California, with the couple who declined left to find other work in the Great White North. Poly9's official website is also blanked out, but in the past, the company has been credited with developing loads of web-based mapping programs (primarily in Flash, crazily enough) as well as APIs for a handful of monolithic clients like Microsoft, Yahoo!, NORAD and MSNBC. Generally speaking, Apple tends to integrate its purchases into the workflow at a rather rapid clip, so we're actually expectingto come of this in the not-too-distant future. What, exactly, remains to be seen.[Thanks, Anonymous]