"Someday, there will be the Paul Rademacher statue in front of the Googleplex," says Greg Sterling, an analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence. Microsoft and Yahoo followed suit, and before long the Web was awash in map mashups. The company hired him and opened up the Google Maps code so anyone could work with it. Rademacher's HousingMaps was an even bigger hit inside Google. "I just wanted to write something that was useful." "I had no idea how big it would be," he says. One Thursday night, he posted a link to the demo on craigslist, and by the next day thousands of people had already taken it for a spin. But in the future, personal GPS systems will likely know the location of each stitch of gridlock, thanks to communication with every other vehicle on the road.Įight weeks later, he had a demo that linked craigslist housing ads to pins he'd added to a Google map. The company scooped the news choppers because its Smart Dust Network, analyzing data from more than 625,000 commercial vehicles and 13,000 road sensors, saw the chaos unfold. When a gasoline tanker crash destroyed a freeway overpass near San Francisco this spring, Seattle-based Inrix knew right away that something big had gone down. Driving the streets with a pile of craigslist ads and pages of maps balanced on his lap, he thought, "Wouldn't it be better to have one map with all the listings on it?" When Google released the first version of Google Maps a couple of months later, Rademacher took a close look at the source code, written in JavaScript. In the fall of 2004 he was looking for an apartment in the Bay Area. But Paul Rademacher, a DreamWorks Animation programmer, changed that when he invented the map mashup. (Those two applications - along with Google Maps for Mobile, which calls up maps and local search results on mobile devices - are overlapping views of the same underlying data.)Īt first, the data all flowed one way, from the mapper to the user. Google released the first version of Google Maps in January 2005, followed by the more intricate 3-D world of Google Earth five months later. Xerox Parc launched its first online mapping application a year before Netscape produced its first browser in the early '90s, and online driving directions of varying reliability have been ubiquitous for nearly a decade. _The idea of providing digital maps _ for the masses is not new. "This is about individuals as local observers, creating their own map data," says Michael Goodchild, a professor of geography at UC Santa Barbara. Whether it's citizens appearing at local zoning-board meetings with elaborate Google Earth presentations or the Air Force using the app to reach victims during Hurricane Katrina, the new mapmaking is about much more than spotting your house in a satellite photo. Once that software existed, the urge to describe and annotate just took off." "What it took was a substrate - the satellite imagery of Earth - in an accessible form and a simple authoring language for people to create and share stuff. "It didn't take sophisticated software," Hanke says. Instead, they are the products of a volunteer army of amateur cartographers. The annotations weren't created by Google, nor by some official mapping agency. "As you can see, it's very well mapped now," Hanke says, pulling up a photo of a Hindu temple. Chinnaswamy Stadium, links to a Wikipedia entry about the legendary cricket matches played there. An icon hovering over the Karnataka High Court calls up a photo of its bright red exterior and a link to an account of its long, distinguished history. Pointing at one brings up a text bubble identifying a location of interest: a university, a racetrack, a library. Now, however, hundreds of small icons pop up on the screen. "Bangalore wasn't mapped on Google's products," he says, "and it really wasn't very well mapped, period." At first, the city appeared in Google Earth as little more than a hi-res satellite photo. Hanke, the director of Google Earth and Google Maps, zooms in for a closer look at Bangalore. Years later, a British geographer wrote that, to Rennell, "blanks on the map of the world were eyesores." More than two centuries later, within the decidedly safer confines of Building 45 on Google's Mountain View, California, campus, John Hanke clicks the 3-foot image of Earth projected on his office wall and spins it around to India. He survived, and his detailed maps and atlas, published in the 1780s, defined British understanding of India for generations. During the six-year journey, one soldier was killed by a tiger, five were mauled by a leopard, and Rennell was wounded in an attack by angry locals. Traveling with a small party of soldiers, he used the advanced technologies of the day: a compass and a distance-measuring wheel called a perambulator. In 1765, a 22-year-old British naval officer named James Rennell set out to map the entire Indian subcontinent.
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