elite
eliteというと、もキャリア官僚や上流社会の名士などのイメージが強い単語ですが、もともとフランス語の「えり抜かれた」が語源なので、elite teamは「精鋭部隊、精鋭チーム」となります。確認程度のものです。なお、flummox（＝confuse）がまた登場しています。（UG）
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/A30/20120828/1346142696
Apple Maps Errors Send Japanese to Homegrown App
TOKYO — When Hikarie, Tokyo’s new must-visit shopping destination, opened in April, it was already old news on Mapion’s map application. An elite team at the company, which is based here, had marked the glass tower a year earlier, keeping the service a step ahead in this fast-changing city.
Mapion is one of Japan’s homegrown companies that is benefiting from Apple’s maps debacle, which has left local owners of the new iPhone 5 flummoxed over erroneous place names, long-outdated landmarks and train stations that appear to hover in the middle of the sea.
Those errors have prompted legions of users to flock to other map services, including Mapion, which has seized the day by promoting a map app it says is among the most obsessively checked and updated in Japan.
Downloads of its Mapion iPhone app, introduced in June, have jumped threefold since Apple released an update to its mobile software last week that replaced Google’s maps with its own, said Yasunori Yamagishi, who runs Mapion’s development team.
“Apple Maps has definitely been a tail wind for us,” Mr. Yamagishi said. “It goes to show how much time and effort it takes to build a map for somewhere like Japan.”
Apple’s decision to switch to its own, less-polished maps does not appear to have hurt sales of its latest iPhone, which went on sale Friday in Japan to long lines and much fanfare. But it has demonstrated, on a global scale, how Apple, a seemingly infallible company, is still prone to embarrassing missteps.
Apple’s map errors have been particularly embarrassing in hard-to-navigate Japan, where maps have become an essential smartphone feature. In Japan, most streets do not have names, and house numbers are often assigned by order of registration, not location. Before GPS and smartphones, the Japanese often went around city blocks two or three times, puzzling over well-worn maps looking for an address.
