We know vanishingly little about Apple's top executives. At most we get dribs and drabs of information, like CEO Tim Cook's bicycling regimen or design chief Jony Ive's Aston Martin.
Then there's Apple executive Eddy Cue.
Cue had been primarily responsible for Apple's iTunes Store, App Store, and iCloud email, calendar, and file services. He added responsibility for Maps after Scott Forstall, the executive in charge of it at launch, left Apple.
Other than that, we don't know squat.
So we turned to the unlikeliest of sources for insight into Cue: his Foursquare friends list.
Like pieces in a mosaic, Cue's friends and their stories combine to form a full picture of the executive himself.
Why Foursquare? We were inspired to check out Cue's presence on the location check-in service after rumors that Apple was pursuing a deal with Foursquare to improve its mapping service.
After we looked at his friends, though, we realized that these publicly shared connections might be far more telling than the accounts Cue follows on his lightly used Twitter account or his carefully locked down Facebook profile.
That's because, when you sign up for Foursquare, the app encourages you to scan your address book for friends' phone numbers—meaning that you tend to add the people you actually call or text. Founder and CEO Dennis Crowley has suggested this and other features make it more likely that you add your real friends on Foursquare.
Foursquare only lists first names and last initials, but a trivial amount of sleuthing and cross-checking on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn identified some very interesting contacts.
Axel Jessen, Apple
Jessen, previously a manager of Apple's online services, now works in the office of the CEO providing executive technical support. His LinkedIn profile has a brief debunking of the myth that Steve Jobs killed off Apple's eWorld service when he returned to the company.
Based on his career history, it's likely that Jessen worked with Cue in Apple's IT operations.
Blake Roberts, Pier to Pier Brokers
Robert, a former Apple executive, now works in real estate in the Los Angeles area.
Brenda Spoonemore, Dwellable
Spoonemore's Foursquare profile was unlinked to other accounts, but we quickly found her professional connection to Cue: As SVP of interactive services at the NBA, she signed a deal to bring basketball games to iTunes in 2006. She's now CEO of Dwellable.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.
