What’s in it for me? Learn how one tiny start-up made Google Maps and Google Earth a reality.
When was the last time you were lost? If you’ve got a cell phone with Google Maps, it’s unlikely you can remember the feeling. In fact, the next generation may never know what it's like to be lost. Thanks to Google, they’ll always know exactly where they are and how to get where they want to go.
But Google Maps and Google Earth didn’t turn up overnight. Instead, the story of these programs goes all the way back to Keyhole, a Silicon Valley start-up that barely survived the financial turmoil following the dot-com bubble.
In these blinks, we’ll follow Keyhole’s product and marketing director, Bill Kilday – from the start-up’s tiny cubicles in Mountain View, California, to the shiny offices of the Googleplex. We’ll also discover the origins of the technology that has made sure we’ll never be lost again.
In these blinks, you’ll learn
how Keyhole helped solve a brutal murder case;
why the Iraq War was a catalyst in the development of digital mapping; and
what working at Google was like in the mid-2000s.
At the beginning of the Google Maps story is a little start-up called Keyhole.
On a warm spring day in 1999, Bill Kilday answered a phone call from an old college friend. It was John Hanke, an intellectual whiz kid Kilday had known since freshman year at the University of Texas. There was something John desperately wanted Bill to see.
Later that day, Bill and his fiancée, Shelley, watched as John set up a computer in their spare room. On the screen was the earth – a blue dot in dark space. Bill and Shelley were unimpressed at first, but then they watched as John zoomed in and zoomed in some more.
He flew down, like Superman, to the North American continent, then to the USA, then to Austin, Texas, until they were looking at the roof of Bill and Shelley’s own house. Bill and Shelley were astonished.
The key message here is: At the beginning of the Google Maps story is a little start-up called Keyhole.
This demo, called EarthViewer, would one day grow into Google Earth and Google Maps. For now, though, the technology belonged to a small Silicon Valley start-up called Keyhole.
The company had recently appointed John Hanke as CEO. He led a team of experienced software engineers from a tiny office in Mountain View, California. After John noticed the potential of the EarthViewer project, the company focused all its efforts on making it a success.
Keyhole’s dream was to create an EarthViewer program that could be run on any computer in the world. But that dream would have to wait, because the technology simply wouldn’t allow for it – at least not yet.
One area in which they could make progress without delay was data collection. After all, mapping the earth required lots of data.
At first, Keyhole used a compilation of free satellite images provided by NASA called Blue Marble. But they soon realized that getting higher-resolution images would mean using photos captured from advanced imaging satellites or low-flying planes.
This led Keyhole to the work of Airphoto USA, a company run by a long-haired, heavy-drinking biker named J. R. Robertson. With his fleet of fourteen planes, this renegade CEO had mapped many large cities. And with access to these images, Keyhole began the process of mapping the world.
Keyhole survived the dot-com bubble by appealing to diverse clients.
The year is 2001. The dot-com bubble has burst, and all the optimism of the 1990s has turned to terror as investors pull their money from the stock market. For many internet and tech businesses, this is the end.
Start-ups like Keyhole needed venture capitalists to believe in them. But at the time, there was very little belief to go around. So, to steady the ship, Keyhole changed course.
The initial idea for EarthViewer had been to target individual consumers. Now Keyhole chose to cast a wider net and sell its newly developed program to other kinds of customers, too.
Here’s the key message: Keyhole survived the dot-com bubble by appealing to diverse clients.
First, Keyhole turned to the real estate industry. Staff began attending trade shows, where they demonstrated EarthViewer from their booth.
At one of these events, Bill Kilday, who was now Keyhole’s product and marketing director, showed a stunned real estate developer the Nicaraguan beach he was interested in. Bill zoomed in and out on the white sands and surrounding unspoiled jungle, demonstrating how anyone searching for new property could do so from behind a comfortable desk. The possibilities were mind-blowing.
Keyhole also found government clients. For instance, San Bernardino County, in southern California, began using EarthViewer to survey the territory as they fought forest fires.
One of the most dramatic uses of EarthViewer was at the Santa Clara district attorney’s office. They were investigating Scott Peterson, a man suspected of murdering his pregnant wife. After slipping a GPS tracker under his truck’s bumper, investigators traced his actions for several weeks after his wife’s disappearance.
Keyhole ran this data through the EarthViewer program. Not only were they able to trace where Scott Peterson’s truck had been; they could measure the time and speed of his travels. It turns out he’d kept returning to the Berkeley Marina, and had cruised up and down the shoreline at a very slow speed. Weeks later, the body of his wife washed up on that shore. Scott Peterson was convicted of murder.
With all these different applications, Keyhole was able to survive – while other tech companies disappeared as the bubble burst.
The US-led invasion of Iraq transformed Keyhole’s fate.
In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq. President George W. Bush spoke of “shock and awe” as bombs rained down on Baghdad. As the world came to terms with this military aggression, Keyhole was about to be transformed.
On March 27, 2003, David Kornmann, one of Keyhole’s employees, came into the office, made a pot of coffee, and then saw a fax that had come through during the night. It was a signed contract from CNN worth $75,000.
The cable news network would be using EarthViewer as part of its coverage of the conflict in Iraq. Soon the rest of the world would be using it, too.
This is the key message: The US-led invasion of Iraq transformed Keyhole’s fate.
While the offer wasn’t particularly lucrative, John Hanke accepted it – on the condition that CNN include Keyhole’s URL each time they used EarthViewer on air. That clause in the contract more than made up for the low initial sum.
Later that evening, CNN started a new eight o’clock segment as part of its 24/7 coverage of the invasion of Iraq. During that segment, reporter Miles O’Brien turned to a map animation.
Instead of using a standard prepackaged video, O’Brien used Keyhole’s EarthViewer to zoom around Baghdad. He showed new satellite shots that revealed extensive bomb damage throughout the city. In the upper-right-hand corner, EarthViewer.com was prominently displayed.
As the CNN segment aired, the Keyhole website was flooded with traffic as thousands of people came to check out the site. The response was so overwhelming that Keyhole’s servers were down for most of the next day.
Soon, Keyhole was appearing in major newspapers and magazines, including Newsweek and the New York Times. All across the world, demand for EarthViewer soared.
While all of this was going on, Keyhole signed a contract with In-Q-Tel, a venture-capital fund run by the CIA. In-Q-Tel had been set up to fund companies that could be useful to the US government.
Keyhole’s EarthViewer, of course, had crucial applications for intelligence activities. So In-Q-Tel offered Keyhole a contract worth $1.5 million in exchange for the development of a private version of the EarthViewer system.
It was by far the most lucrative contract the start-up had signed. But it was nothing compared to the bigger deal that was coming next.
Google took its search capacity to the next level when it acquired Keyhole in 2004.
One day in April 2004, John Hanke and Bill Kilday went out for drinks after work. Before they reached the bar, John told Bill that he had a secret to share. It was so big that Bill couldn’t tell anyone – not even his wife.
After checking that nobody was in earshot, John turned to Bill and told him the news: “Google wants to buy us.”
Bill was stunned. Google had just announced that they were going public, and the tech giant was valued at $27 billion. But Bill was also confused. Why would a search engine company want to buy Keyhole? Google didn’t do maps. Or did they?
The key message here is: Google took its search capacity to the next level when it acquired Keyhole in 2004.
The story began at Google’s office, where executives were attending a meeting about Picasa, the company’s photo-editing software. Halfway through the session, Google cofounder Sergey Brin dropped in after a game of volleyball on the company’s sand court.
He flipped open his laptop and began staring at something another employee had sent him. The manager giving the presentation noticed that Brin wasn’t paying attention, and asked whether Brin could share what was so important.
Brin took over the projector the manager had been using and showed the room Keyhole’s EarthViewer. The executives were astonished. Without trying to justify it as a business strategy, Brin simply said: “We should buy this company.”
And so John Hanke met Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, at the company headquarters. Walking into the founders’ shared office at the Googleplex, Hanke saw a room filled with deconstructed toys, hockey sticks, and dirty athletic clothes. Clearly, they weren’t conventional CEOs.
Hanke asked the founders how they thought EarthViewer would fit Google’s business model. Page answered that EarthViewer could be something that was core to Google.
In fact, the EarthViewer concept would fit neatly alongside Google’s search engine, since both were just ways of organizing data. The search engine linked people to the most relevant websites, while the mapping program would link them to everything in a particular city or on a certain street.
Page and Brin could see a future in which this mapping technology would change everything. And that’s exactly what it did.
The Keyhole team, along with talented Google employees, engineered Google Maps.
It wasn’t long before Keyhole signed the Google deal. Every single member of Keyhole’s 29-person team was hired by the tech giant.
They were all invited to the Googleplex, Google’s shiny corporate headquarters, and received their badges as Google employees. As they looked around their new workplace, the Keyhole team could see that things were going to be very different.
The key message is this: The Keyhole team, along with talented Google employees, engineered Google Maps.
Compared to the staff’s old Keyhole office, Google’s accommodations were much more comfortable.
To get to work, Google employees had access to a free shuttle bus that traveled around the San Francisco Bay Area, with a juice bar and barista to greet them as they disembarked at HQ. They could also use bikes, electric scooters, and Segways to get around.
At the office, there was fresh juice on tap, as well as jars of candy, chips, and nuts that employees could have whenever they wanted. There was also a gym, a pool, and a beach volleyball court. Oh, and let’s not forget the massage room!
In every Google building there was also a Techstop, where Google employees could take whatever electrical equipment they needed for free – including computer cases, software, chargers, Wi-Fi routers, and more.
After their induction, it was time for the Keyhole team to get to work. Their first assignment was to engineer Google Maps, which involved three separate teams.
First, there was the original Keyhole team, which turned the stitched-together aerial and satellite imagery into a browser viewer. Then it was time for Danish brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen, whose start-up Where2Tech had also been acquired by Google, to do their thing.
The Rasmussen brothers brought their “prerendering” method to digital mapping. This meant that the program could predict what parts of a map you might want to look at next, so that they would load quickly. Along with a talented young programmer named Bret Taylor, the Rasmussens created the “map view.”
Finally, “Googlers” Dan Egnor and Elizabeth Harmon developed the most current “point data.” This made sure that whenever someone searched for a shop, café, or business, its location was accurate and up-to-date.
And so, in collaboration with their fellow developers, the Keyhole team brought Google Maps to life.
Google Maps sparked an information and commercial revolution.
Google Maps officially launched in February 2005. The program was incredibly popular, and received glowing reviews from individuals and the media.
Along with this mainstream appeal, it was well-received by web developers and the business community, too. That’s because Google Maps opened up possibilities for more innovation – possibilities that were only beginning to be understood.
A large part of this appeal came from Google’s approach to its technology. Instead of focusing on short-term profits, the company was more interested in opening up the world of information and the opportunities that came with that. That’s why Google Maps was free to use and easy to customize.
Here’s the key message: Google Maps sparked an information and commercial revolution.
It didn’t take long before innovative web developers began customizing Google Maps for their own purposes. One example was Paul Rademacher, an animator working at DreamWorks. After spending months unable to find affordable housing in the San Francisco Bay Area, he decided to do something about it.
As soon as Google Maps went live, he dug into the website code and began designing his own version of the program. In just three days, he’d made a website called housingmaps.com, which displayed all the available rental properties in the area.
Other innovators designed versions of Google Maps that showed crime statistics in Chicago, incidents of police brutality in Los Angeles, logging operations in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and bicycle accidents in Portland.
While some independent web developers were combining their own data with Google’s and customizing the product for specific purposes, other users were taking it a step further. These were the full-scale commercial enterprises that came to rely on Google Maps entirely.
Just think of Hotels.com, Yelp, Zillow, Strava, Lyft, and Uber. Some of these businesses would go on to become multibillion-dollar enterprises. And they built their entire business model on the back of a computer program that Google provided for free.
Google's mapping technology has been a powerful force for good.
Google has always been a different kind of business. For a long time, its motto was Don’t Be Evil, which summed up the company’s purpose as well as the ethos of its user-centric products.
This company mission became apparent to the Keyhole team when they joined. It became even more apparent to Bill Kilday in 2005, when two events made him realize that Google’s mapping technology could literally save lives.
The key message here is: Google's mapping technology has been a powerful force for good.
The first of these events came in August 2005. That month, Hurricane Katrina smashed into the eastern United States, hitting New Orleans especially hard. As floods swept through the city, the team at Google knew they had to help.
John Hanke contacted an aerial imagery pilot working over New Orleans. He then asked his team to upload this pilot’s new data straight into Google Maps and Google Earth. This new imagery provided evacuees from New Orleans with an updated look at their devastated city.
Google’s true usefulness only became apparent days later, however, when Bill Kilday listened to a voice mail from Ron Shroeder, a staff sergeant with a medevac team working with the Coast Guard helicopter fleet. Shroeder described how the Coast Guard was using Google Earth to save hundreds of lives in flooded New Orleans.
When people trapped on their rooftops or in their attics called 911, they gave their address. But in a raging flood, a street address isn’t helpful. And so the Coast Guard team would type the address into Google Earth and extract the GPS coordinates. Then they’d radio this information to the search helicopter, and rescue the caller.
The second event that struck Bill Kilday came later that year. In October, he met with Rebecca Moore, an environmental campaigner who’d requested a meeting with the company. She’d been using Google Earth to combat destructive logging operations in the Santa Cruz mountains.
Using Google Earth, Moore revealed to her community the scale of the planned logging – which, if it had gone forward, would have destroyed acres of precious redwood trees. Her vivid presentation, which even included 3-D log-carrying helicopters, convinced the community to reject the proposed logging project. Google was so impressed by Moore’s ingenuity that they hired her to work on Google Earth outreach.
Nobody could have foreseen these incredible applications of Google Earth, least of all the Keyhole team that began mapping the world all those years ago. But one thing’s for sure: many people are glad that they did.
Final summary
The key message in these blinks:
Google Earth and Google Maps have their origins in a little Californian tech start-up called Keyhole. After making it through the dot-com bubble, the company found fame with CNN’s adoption of its EarthViewer program during the Iraq War. After being acquired by Google in 2005, the Keyhole team continued to develop its mapping program, which led to Google Maps and Google Earth. These programs have changed the world, from the way we do business to how we combat natural disasters – and everything in between.
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What to read next: Valley of Genius, by Adam Fisher
You’ve just learned how one little start-up helped develop two of the twenty-first century’s most ubiquitous applications, Google Maps and Google Earth. As with many of our modern tech innovations, they came from California’s Silicon Valley.
Silicon Valley is a place of miraculous invention. With its disruptive technologies and powerful economy, it has changed the world as we know it. Interested in learning more about this influential region? Then check out the blinks to Valley of Genius, which tell the tale of this technological wellspring, from the deep rivalries between tech giants to the staggering inventions of some of its luminaries.