The story of how I invented Google Maps
This is how I [almost] invented Google Maps. The untold story of an application that could have been...
I really hate political campaigns. Don't you?
TV ads, radio spots, verbal attacks, political dirty war, and recently, even physical attacks (if not worst). But above all, visual and physical pollution all around the city streets.
Am I wrong?
Maybe it would be different if each political party cleaned the city of posters, garbage and billboards, but it seems not like that... They usually leave all the cleaning responsibility to the mayor in turn.
How do they spend their budget?
Idea Origins
Plato said: our need will be the real creator .
Around 1997 there were state elections in Nuevo León, Northern Mexican state, and it happened that the city was filled with billboards, posters and other physical publicity. Keep in mind in '97 there were no social networks and advertising was really different.
Faced with this problem and as a good Computer’s Engineer as I am, I came up with a solution:
Short list requirements:
- To have an available application where we could mark on a map the places needing cleaning from political propaganda.
- For ease, there would be maps with different resolutions, georeferenced, to help visualization.
- Once a point in the map was double-clicked, the next level of resolution of the map corresponding to the clicked area would be displayed. And so on until reaching the maximum level of resolution available.
Does this application sound familiar?
Located in 1997, the Internet was in its infancy in Mexico, large companies and Universities already had it implemented, but end users used AOL or some other dial-up service to be connected using a Modem, so, it was not really common to think of Web Applications, unless they were within the company, in what we call Intranet.
Initial research
Looking for how to implement this application, I bought the Guia Roji (a Mexican brand commercializing printed maps) to review what information they had. Somehow I identified that the INEGII provided the maps. At this point the elections were over and I set the idea to rest.
First Implementation
Some time later, a need arose in the company I worked at the time, this requirement was to show a map or diagram of the warehouses showing their usage, status and other information queried from a database.
I used this opportunity to implement the solution I had thought time ago, this time as a PC application. The delivered development was an application that allowed users to upload an image and graphically define areas on the image to be able to execute actions. In other words, upload an image, and by double-clicking it, load another image or display an information dialog.
With this application I satisfied my curiosity and finished that iteration of the project.
Second Implementation
Google Maps
Who is not familiar with Google Maps?
According to its Wikipedia page, Google Maps started as a company in 2003. By 2004 it was acquired by Google.
In the more simplistic way, Google Maps works by displaying an image and when clicking on a position it shows the next level of resolution. It also displays additional information on these maps; all of it by Internet.
And I had my idea 6 years before…
Lessons learned
We need to have a “Shark Mindset”.
I use the phrase when I want to stress the fact of having a business focus and looking for ways to take advantage of our ideas.
Definitely we all have ideas whether those are to create new products and processes or improving existing ones.
Who knows, maybe that idea you have chiming in your head is the next multimillion-dollar company.
BTW, have I already told you how I invented online conferences? No? That story will be part of another post.
Our need will be the real creator - Plato
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