Google Maps changed the way we get around. It all started in an extra bedroom in Sydney | Technology

S.Tephen MA has any right to demand boasting rights to help hatch the world’s most popular online mapping platform. Instead, MA, one of the four co -founders of Google Maps instead of the past two decades, has buried himself in a large black hole of anonymity. But not because of any shame or regret – it’s just that he’s not one to blow up his own trumpet.

“I tend to be a very private person,” says MA in a rare conversation. “I find the limelight uncomfortable.”

In the years since the launch of February 8, 2005, Google Maps has worn into our daily lives and become – as water or electricity – an important service. It is a pocket atlas, compass, restaurant guide, bus plan and go-to search and recommendation engine for all our geospatial queries.

Google Maps has become an online Juggernaut that boasts more than 2 billion monthly users around the world who remain on a trajectory with merciless expansion in scale and scale. It also operates countless third-party platforms, including Airbnb, Uber, Real Estate Portals and Food Supply and E-commerce platforms that depend on Google Maps’ Locational and Navigation Prowess.

Technology is now an important pillar of Google/Alphabet Technology Complex, a company that the author and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari describes as one of our “impervious, algorithmic overlords”.

On the threshold of Google Maps ’20 year’s anniversary, the 54-year-old Australian software engineer has had a heart change. He will write himself back in the founding story – as well as recognizing others whose contributions are overlooked or underestimated.

Being recognized as a Google Maps founder still provides a lot of respect from the Vote Society -especially in Australia where Google Maps was born. It may not make you a household name, but it can open doors.

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MA’s story begins in New South Wales Country Town of Coma, where his family ran a Chinese restaurant. For 20 years until the mid-1980s, Dragon’s Gate was a fixture on Coomas Main Street, serving Cantonese-Australian favorites, including chicken chow mein and sweet and sour pork.

It gave a livelihood for the extended family and everyone threw themselves in. When he did not go to school, MA worked and took payments, bookings and takeaway orders. In all other respects, however, he remembers it as a normal childhood – of which much was used in front of screens.

“I did a lot of the stereotyped tech -nerd -Ting like playing video games and learning how to program on an Apple II computer,” he remembers.

In 1998, MA graduated from the university and worked in Sydney when he landed a job in Silicon Valley, as did Dotcom Boom to carefully against Peak Insanity. Then the bubble burst, and in the early 2000s, MA found with thousands of others in the technology sector unemployed.

After returning to Sydney, he was contacted by a former colleague and colleague Australian called Noel Gordon, who invited MA to join him and two other unemployed software engineers – the Danish brothers Jens and Lars Rasmussen – to work at a start -up . Their big idea was to build a new type of mapping platform.

At that time, the undisputed market leader in online mapping was Mapquest, who had been acquired by Internet giant AOL in 1999 for the then staggering amount of USD 1.1 billion.

But Mapquest was clumsy and lived halfway between the digital and analog worlds: a user planning a route had to print the turn-by-turn direction from their desktop or laptop. It was a digital dinosaur, completely unaware of the nearby disaster.

Called themselves where 2 technologies, the four partners were based in the extra bedroom in Gordon’s apartment in Sydney suburb of Hunters Hill and began building a Windows application program they called expedition.

A screen shot of prototype MA in 2004 shows me has a well -known look and feeling. There is an address beam at the top and in the center, a map of the center of San Francisco with a route after Interstate 80 over the Bay Bridge highlighted as a red line. Two placement pins, in the form of a US-style letterbox on a rod, mark specific locations.

“I’m actually surprised at how similar it looks to what Google Maps looks like today,” says MA, inspecting the screen for the first time in many years.

This was the demo presented to Sequoia Capital, the legendary Silicon Valley Venture Capital company that has been beating some of the biggest names in the starting world since the 1970s. Where 2 crew hoped to secure some seed financing and remove the pressure from their dwindling personal savings and maxed-out credit card.

But in March 2004, Yahoo Maps launched a new feature called SmartView that enabled users to conduct card -based searches for restaurants and entertainment sites. Today it is a standard feature on all online maps; Back then, it was groundbreaking enough to spook Sequoia to pull the plug on the deal.

As a consolation award, the where 2 team was introduced to Google, one of Sequoia’s star clients. And not just someone at Google: They got to present their demo to Larry Page, one of Google’s co -founders.

Page was impressed but had no interest in desktop software. “We really Like the Internet, ”he told Rasmussen Brothers – which means Google was only interested if the card has worked in the web browser.

WHERE 2 team shrank together a web version of their program using a slightly well-known set of web development techniques known by the abbreviation Ajax, map for asynchronous JavaScript and XML, a web language. This meant that an already loaded web page could download new data – in other words, update itself – without having to update the entire page.

Instead of loading a massive image of a card, the web page would load several smaller card tiles and show them as needed. It gave the feeling of dynamic, friction -free movement you are now experiencing on all online mapping platforms.

The demo was a hit. Google hired the WHERE 2 team and then bought their intellectual property at a non -revealed price.

“Google was very good at getting good teams at very low prices because there was no competition in the acquisition area at the time,” says MA.

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WHERE 2 SALE PRICE has never been revealed, but there are clues in Google’s annual report from 2004: It revealed that US $ 66 million. Had been overlooked in a combination of cash, future performance bonuses, shares and opportunities for four small acquisitions, including where 2. It would have been shared between several owners.

Since then, shares in Google’s holding company alphabet have increased. Adaptation of stock divisions was worth a stock around US $ 2 when the company floated in 2004. This week, shares are trading in US $ 190 to $ 2000.

On June 7, 2004, 2 crews appeared to work as Google employees at the company’s Sydney office, which at that time included only six sellers. Eight months later, Google Maps debuted.

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“IIt’s a great product and they did what they did very successfully, ”says Prof Scott McQuire, professor of media and communication at the University of Melbourne. ”(But) Google Maps works on the basis of data extraction. It gets location information, so it is very valuable data for all kinds of people who want to collect information about you. “

MA says that commercialization and data mining were not on the radar when he worked on the cards. These showed up after moving on to other projects in 2006. ”I don’t think we were thinking about it too much about it at the time,” he says.

“The ruling belief was that once you’ve got the users on board, you could then find out a strategy.”

He recognizes the concerns of privacy: the task of keeping businesses honest and transparent is partly in the user’s hands and partly responsibility for governments, he says. “The biggest problem is the fact that the technology landscape is changing so quickly. It is very difficult for these regulatory mechanisms to follow. “

It is not only privacy that raises red flags. There is also a growing fear of the effect over-dependence of satellite navigation and by inference has Google Maps on brain function.

Scientific studies show that extended dependence on the helpers of these drivers may be associated with a reduction in the hippocampus, the part of the brain dealing with spatial memory. This can be a factor in cognitive decline.

MA recognizes that there are potential dangers in the admission of many new technologies, but believe that we need to be aware of more than concerned. “I think like humans, we are very adaptable. But do we adapt it in a way that overcomes the potential injury? I don’t know. “

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MA is not the type of creepy, large-vision character that is usually associated with the start-up scene. He is a little effortless, a little traditional and not one for chit chat. But he is proud of the role he played to get Google Maps off the ground.

“There are ways of feeling rewarded,” he says. “It can be monetary, it can be recognition. But knowing that so many people use something that I helped build, it’s probably the most satisfying part of it. “

As for who gets credit, MA says, while there were originally four people behind, where 2, most of the kudos should go to Jens and Lars Rasmussen: It was their idea in the first place.

But there are others whose contributions are overlooked. In particular, he quotes Bret Taylor, James Norris, Andrew Kirmse and Seth LaForge, whose names were included on the original Google Maps patent. If there are any arguments about Google Maps’s origin story, MA says this list should raise the dispute.

“I think it’s important because the perception is often that one or two people are responsible for most of the work, while it almost always becomes a team.”

Noel Gordon, MA’s Google Maps co -founder, describes MA as a “Rockstar Software Engineer” that can write beautiful code with “No fat on it”.

“Stephen is one of the people who come directly to the point to be resolved really quickly. He’s just one of a kind. “

These days, MA is working with a partner in a venture called Reggie Health. It uses AI to automate administrative tasks for healthcare providers and anyone else who needs to juggle appointments, manage patients and send reminders.

Since then, Google leaves 14 years ago MA has only ever worked in startups: Until this time no one has been successful. But it doesn’t deter him. He is someone who gets a tension by tackling problems and finding solutions.