First there were paper maps: trying not to get lost, we walked around with these folding maps that when you opened them became huge. Then came Google Maps. It arrived (in the United States) on February 8, 2005. The first interface between the physical and digital world. The only way to always arrive at your destination. We all have used it at one time or another. But very few know that behind Google Maps there was no Google but an Australian startup made by such an ill-assorted group that you would not have bet a dollar on it.
The startup was called Where 2, it was in Sydney where Noel Gordon, a software engineer, lived; with him were Stephen Ma, and two Danish brothers, Lars and Jens Rasmussen. It was the two brothers who had come up with the idea of building a new way to use online maps; they arrived in Sydney, found Noel Gordon, who was much older than them (52 years old) and worked in a clothes factory; and Ma, who instead was at a gas station; joined forces and founded Where 2. It was 2003 and the World Wide Web was like the Word Wide Wait, the great wait, Gordon will say years later: “You clicked on a map, you went for a cup of coffee and then you went back to see her”. In those months, many had been working to solve the problem (in 2004 Yahoo !, which at the time was one of the most used sites, will launch its maps).
But the technology developed by the Sydney startup – initially called Expedition – was superior. The two brothers went to Silicon Valley to tell it to Google cofounder Larry Page who was interested but asked to switch from the “download and install” version to a web application usable by the browser. In August 2004 it was ready, Google bought itself Where 2 for a sum that was never revealed by hiring the four founders and this story was practically buried until Google Maps turned 15, in 2020: then Noel Gordon, l ‘the only one of the four to still work at Google, he told it by also publishing a photo of the whiteboard with the notes of the four founders in the summer of 2004 just before making the hit of their life.
On launch day Gordon will say, “We had a pretty amazing launch. On the first day, Google Maps was used ten million times. A year later it had grown to 60 million maps a day. Today a billion people use it every day ”.