I was asked to give bio for a conference. It wasn't approved, but here nobody can stop me: "Maxime Lenormand doesn't have a clue what he's doing with his life: at the moment he plays around with satellite imagery hoping to make something useful out of it. When he's not doing that he asks people long winded questions about the meaning of life, what books they like and how the heck they ended up also playing with maps all day"
Deep Down the Google Maps Rabbit hole
Hey there,
Deep Down the Google Maps Rabbit hole
I like preparing quite a bit ahead of conversations I have on the podcast. These past few weeks have led me to learn quite a bit about the history of Google Maps & Google Earth, and I'd like to share a few of those learnings
A book
All this started ahead of preparing my interview with Ariel Seidman, the CEO & co-founder of Hivemapper. Ariel worked at Yahoo on Search & Maps in the mid 2000s so had an interest in maps quite early on. Ahead of our conversation his team sent me one of the dashcams they sell for mapping, to try out for myself. A few weeks later we have our conversation on the podcast, and as I often do after recording I ask him if he would recommend anybody else I talk to. He introduced me to Brian McClendon, who was VP of Engineering & led Google Geo for a decade during the Google Maps days. To prepare for that interview, I read Bill Kilday's Never Lost Again (Affiliate Link to the book).
If you want to learn about the story behind Google Maps, Google Earth, Street View & other Google mapping projects, this is probably the best resource out there. It's a wild story of computer graphics, companies making incredible tech but struggling to find customers, and Google's mid-2000s working culture
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A video
I had never heard of Google's Project Ground Truth before reading Bill's book. If you haven't heard about it either, I can only recommend looking it up. It's the not-so-visible work that went behind taking Google Maps from 'just' a map in the browser to making navigation available.
The business incentives behind this project are really interesting, Bill describes in his book how growing costs from navigation data providers just kept on growing so Google decided to try it out for themselves. The tech that enabled this is equally as interesting.
If like me you like nerding about mapping technology, this Google I/O presentation from 2013 (!) still holds up as a fascinating look into how Google build road networks & navigation data:
A podcast
Okay, I'll shill for my own stuff a bit here.
I did have Brian McClendon on the podcast, and we did talk about a lot of the previous topics mentioned above. If you want to hear a lot of the story behind Google Maps, I'll (absolutely without bias) say I think this conversation is worth your time.
It starts with the Nintendo 64, goes through the impact of the Irak war on this small company called Keyhole, that gets acquired in 2004, to how Google nearly started a war in Nicaragua because of wrong borders.
As usual the episode is available on all the usual podcast platforms:
And you can see the shownotes or listen directly on the website.
Other projects
I've been working on another big video along the same lines as the previous intro to satellite imagery one I did a while ago.
If you want some early looks, I'm starting to post some of it over on my Patreon. Wink wink, nudge nudge.
Thanks for reading, see you next time!
Cheers,
Maxime
Maxime Lenormand
I was asked to give bio for a conference. It wasn't approved, but here nobody can stop me: "Maxime Lenormand doesn't have a clue what he's doing with his life: at the moment he plays around with satellite imagery hoping to make something useful out of it. When he's not doing that he asks people long winded questions about the meaning of life, what books they like and how the heck they ended up also playing with maps all day"
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