sTephen Ma has every right to assert bragging rights to help hatch the world's most popular online mapping platform. Instead, Ma, one of Google Maps' four co-founders for the past 20 years, has been buried in a large black hole of anonymity. But it's not for shame or regret. It just means he's not the one who blows his trumpet.
“I tend to be a very personal person,” says Ma in an unusual interview. “I think the spotlight is offensive.”
For several years since its launch on February 8th, 2005, Google Maps has roamed the path to our everyday lives, becoming an important service, like water and electricity. Search and recommendation engine for Pocket Atlas, Compass, Restaurant Guide, Bus Timetables, and all Geospatial Queries.
Currently, on the eve of Google Maps' 20th anniversary, the 54-year-old Australian software engineer is undergoing a change of heart. He wants to write himself back to the foundation story. They also want to acknowledge others who have overlooked or are supporting their contributions.
Being recognized as the founder of Google Maps has earned much respect from the STEM community. Especially in Australia, when Google Maps was born. It may not make you a generic name, but you can open the door.
sTeffen Ma's story begins in the countryside of Cooma in New South Wales, where his family runs a Chinese restaurant. For 20 years until the mid-1980s, Dragon's Gate was a fixture on Cooma's main street, offering Cantonese Australian favorites such as chicken butterfly main and sweet and sour pork.
It made a living selling to a large family and everyone. When he wasn't in school, Massachusetts worked Till and received payments, reservations and take-out orders. But in all other respects, he remembers it as a normal childhood. Much of this was spent in front of the screen.
“I've done a lot of stereotypical tech nerds, like playing video games and learning how to program on an Apple II computer,” he recalls.
By 1998, MA had graduated from univer…
Google Maps has become an online juggernaut with over 2 billion monthly users worldwide, but this remains on a trajectory of unforgiving expansion in both range and scale. It also powers countless third-party platforms, including Airbnb, Uber, real estate portals, food delivery, and e-commerce platforms that rely on the location and navigation capabilities of Google Maps.
This technology is currently an important pillar of the Google/Alphabet Technology Complex, and is described by author and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari as one of the “immeasurable overlords of algorithms.”
Currently, on the eve of Google Maps' 20th anniversary, the 54-year-old Australian software engineer is undergoing a change of heart. He wants to write himself back to the foundation story. They also want to acknowledge others who have overlooked or are supporting their contributions.
Being recognized as the founder of Google Maps has earned much respect from the STEM community. Especially in Australia, when Google Maps was born. It may not make you a generic name, but you can open the door.
sTeffen Ma's story begins in the countryside of Cooma in New South Wales, where his family runs a Chinese restaurant. For 20 years until the mid-1980s, Dragon's Gate was a fixture on Cooma's main street, offering Cantonese Australian favorites such as chicken butterfly main and sweet and sour pork.
It made a living selling to a large family and everyone. When he wasn't in school, Massachusetts worked Till and received payments, reservations and take-out orders. But in all other respects, he remembers it as a normal childhood. Much of this was spent in front of the screen.
“I've done a lot of stereotypical tech nerds, like playing video games and learning how to program on an Apple II computer,” he recalls.
By 1998, MA had graduated from university and was working in Sydney when he got a job in Silicon Valley, just as the dot-com boom was on sale towards the peak insanity. The bubble then burst, and by the early 2000s, along with thousands of people in the tech sector, they found themselves unemployed.
Back in Sydney, he was contacted by a former colleague and an Australian associate, called Noel Gordon, who was then to Danish brothers Jens and Lars Rasmussen, who were both of him and two other unemployed software engineers. I've joined. Their big idea was to build a new type of mapping platform.
At the time, MapQuest was the undisputed market leader in online mapping. It was acquired in 1999 by internet giant AOL for an astounding total of USD 1.1 billion.
However, MapQuest was clunky and lived in the middle of the world of digital and analogue. Users plotting routes had to print the turn-by-turn direction from their desktop or laptop computer. It is a digital dinosaur and is completely unaware of the upcoming cataclysm.
Two technologies have called themselves the technology, based on the spare bedroom of Gordon's apartment in Hunter's Hill, outside Sydney, and began building a Windows application program called the Expedition.
Screenshots from the 2004 Prototype MA show that I have a look and feel that is familiar to me. There is an address bar at the top and center, a map of downtown San Francisco, highlighting the route leading to Interstate 80 above the Bay Bridge as a red line. Two location pins in the shape of an American style letterbox on a pole mark a specific location.
“In fact, I'm amazed at how similar Google Maps looks today,” MA said, inspecting screenshots for the first time in many years.
This was a demonstration presented to Sequoia Capital, the legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm that has bankrolled some of the biggest names in the startup world since the 1970s. Where two crew members wanted to secure seeds funding and remove pressure from their declining personal savings and biggest credit cards.
However, in March 2004, Yahoo Maps launched a new feature called SmartView, allowing users to perform map-based searches for categories such as restaurants and entertainment. Today, this is the standard feature of all online maps. At the time, it was groundbreaking enough to scare Sequoia and pull the plug of the deal.
As a consolation award, two teams were featured on Google, one of Sequoia's star clients. We were able to present the demo to not only Google people, but to one of Google's co-founders, Larry Page.
The page was impressed, but I wasn't interested in desktop software. “we Really Like the web,” he told Rasmussen Brothers. In other words, Google was only interested in it if it worked on a web browser.
The two teams scrambled the web version of the program using lesser known web development technology known for the acronym Ajax, short for asynchronous JavaScript and the web language XML. This means that an already loaded web page can retrieve new data. That is, we updated itself without having to update the entire page.
Instead of loading a large image of a map, the web page loads multiple small map tiles and displays them as needed. This gave us the sense of dynamic, frictionless movement that we now experience on all online mapping platforms.
The demo was a hit. Google hired two teams and then bought intellectual property at a private price.
“Google was very good at getting a great team at a very low price because there was no competition in the acquisition space at the time,” says MA.
The two selling prices have never been revealed, but Google's 2004 annual report has a clue. It revealed that $66 million rose in a combination of cash, future performance bonuses, stocks and four small acquisition options. It would have been split between multiple owners.
Since then, shares in Google's holding company Alphabet have skyrocket. Adjusting the stock split, when the company came to mind in 2004, the stock was worth around USD 1. This week, stocks are trading in the range of USD 190 to USD 200.
On June 7, 2004, two crew members competed in the job as Google employees in the company's Sydney office. Eight months later, Google Maps debuted.
“I“Professor Scott McKill, professor of media and communication at the University of Melbourne, said: “[But] Google Maps works based on data extraction. It's getting location information, so it's invaluable data for all kinds of people who want to gather information about you. ”
Ma says commercialization and data mining were not on the radar when he was working on maps. These appeared after he moved …
Google Maps has become an online juggernaut with over 2 billion monthly users worldwide, but this remains on a trajectory of unforgiving expansion in both range and scale. It also powers countless third-party platforms
Source: www.theguardian.com
