Thursday 18 October 2007

The man who invented Google Earth..

Berkeley's webcast service has provided a link to a recorded lecture by John Hanke, Product Director for Google Earth. John has had a fascinating and varied career in technology innovation as can be seen in his brief biography from the Berkeley site, reproduced below.

"Product Director for Google Maps, Local, and Earth, John Hanke has an accomplished career in the world of interactive software where he has pursued advances in technology to pioneer new kinds of products. In the early days of the web, Hanke was involved in the start up of one of the first massively multi-player online 3D games ("Meridian 59"), which was acquired by 3DO in 1996. He co-founded a second company, Big Network, to pursue "casual gaming" online. That company was acquired by eUniverse in 2000. He co-founded Keyhole in 2001 to create a new kind of global 3D map of the world. He forged partnerships with Sony, Nvidia, CNN and others as the company introduced its "earth browser" to the world. Keyhole was acquired by Google in October 2004. The Keyhole technology re-emerged as "Google Earth" in July 2005. After receiving his MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley in 1996 and BA in Plan II from The University of Texas at Austin, Hanke worked in foreign affairs for the US Government in Washington, DC and Southeast Asia."


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hold on there, a guy in Idaho had a tourist information website called dogwander.com that google searches brought up way back in 99-2000. Google maps are still essentially the same thing. His maps were the first of this kind and GRASS was the GIS he used.

Someone needs to do a little more research!