Never Lost Again: The Google Mapping Revolution That Sparked New Industries and Augmented Our Reality

In this Silicon Valley corporate memoir, Kilday (marketing director, Google Geo) tells the story of his years at a mapping software company that became the basis for Google's Map and Earth products. In 2001, Kilday was recruited by his college friend John Hanke to do business-to-business marketing for the digital map start-up Keyhole. Their EarthViewer product, with its smooth panning and visually arresting "flyovers" using satellite and aerial images, caught the eye of Google. Just after the 2004 Google IPO, it acquired the company in a bid to unseat MapQuest as the dominant web-based mapping service. More importantly, Google wanted to get into the geographic search business to enhance its ad revenue. By releasing the Google Maps and Google Earth products for free, they soon achieved dominance. Eventual integration with the first iPhones and other mobile devices helped transform how we orient ourselves and revolutionized GPS navigation, autonomous cars, and augmented reality implementations (such as the Pokémon GO app).