Planning a survey starts with gathering existing geographic information about the area of interest. “In Google Earth I draw a polyline around the area, add a title and notes and create a pdf to insert into every proposal.” Quick Access to Public Data If you have even a passing interest in the business of maps, you won’t be disappointed.“I create a ‘survey limits’ sketch that clearly defines what we’re going to include so there are no misunderstandings,” Ambourn continues. I highly recommend you listen to it or download it onto your ebook. Never Lost Again is certainly one of the best books I’ve read about mapping. We can all thank John Hanke and Google for much of that, and especially Bill Kilday for telling us all about it. Mapping is now big business and it’s going in exciting directions. Many people might look at Pokemon Go as just a game but, as Bill Kildare explains, augmented reality maps are the next big step in usability – very soon augmented reality will change the way we view everything around us for ever. That idea, because of the most downloaded app ever – Pokemon Go. He had a new idea – to combine digital maps with augmented reality. And they would do what had previously taken decades to achieve in just a couple of years!Īfter all that success you’d think John Hanke would have been satisfied, but he still had another challenge. Instead, they would embark on their hugely ambitious Ground Truth project – they would simply go about re-mapping the entire planet themselves so they had their own data. Vast sums were spent on buying in aerial photography, satellite imagery and maps without a measurable financial return for Google.Then, to top that, they decided to take control and stop buying in data from other parties. The book’s insight into the workings of Google and of Larry Page’s big idea of moving on from organising the world’s digital data to also organising its spatial data, all for free to the user, at a cost of many millions of dollars to Google, is amazing and, in a business sense, shocking. Without the invention of Google Earth and the huge mapping databases sat behind it many of the services we take for granted today just wouldn’t exist – whether that’s sharing our location with friends on Facebook, finding a restaurant for an evening out with our better halves, getting a lift with Uber, or finding our way to a meeting in a city we’ve never visited before. They got it by buying up Keyhole, its Earth Viewer, John Hanke and the other great minds in its development team.īill Kilday’s fascinating account from his ringside seat as product and marketing manager for Google Earth is compelling and gives an extraordinary insight into the thought processes of some of the people who have immeasurably changed the way we use maps and navigate our way through the day. Larry Page and Sergey Brin needed a solution. Meanwhile Google was realising that searches relating to maps and locations were growing exponentially, and they also realise they had no way of servicing that need. Everyone wanted to explore the world and, more importantly, look at their own house from above! The public was mesmerised and soon everyone wanted Earth Viewer on their own pc. CNN used Keyhole’s Earth Viewer updated with satellite images taken only hours earlier to show live on-air how the war was unfolding. Eventually though, they had their big break – unpredictably that break was the US led invasion of Iraq. Every time they ran out of money and it seemed they would go out of business they miraculously managed to secure a bit more funding from somewhere, or they made a new sale to bring in enough cash to cover the wages and the rental on their small office for yet another month or two. The Keyhole company, created by John Hanke to develop his crazy idea of a digital facsimile of the Earth, struggled against all odds for several years to keep going while it developed its Earth Viewer.
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