61 Bizarre And Funny Snapshots Found On Google Maps (New Pics)

Google Maps has become a tech juggernaut, boasting more than 2 billion monthly users worldwide. It also powers many third-party platforms, from Airbnb and Uber to real estate marketplaces and food delivery services.

The technology is now a key part of the Google/Alphabet product package, but the funny thing is, it just fell into their laps.

Stephen Ma has every right to claim bragging rights for helping to hatch it. Instead, for the past two decades, one of the four co-founders of Google Maps, has mostly stayed out of public eye.

“I tend to be a very private person,” Ma says in a rare interview. “I find the limelight uncomfortable.”

Ma’s story begins in New South Wales, Australia, more specifically, the town of Cooma, where his family ran a Chinese restaurant.

It provided a livelihood for the extended family, and everyone pitched in. When he wasn’t attending school, Ma worked the till, taking payments, bookings, and takeaway orders. In all other respects, however, he remembers it as a normal childhood – much of which was spent in front of screens.

“I did a lot of the stereotypical tech nerd things like playing video games and learning how to program on an Apple II computer,” he explains.

By 1998, Ma had graduated from university and was working in Sydney when he landed a job in Silicon Valley, just as the dotcom boom was rushing towards peak insanity.

Then the bubble burst and, by the early 2000s, Ma, along with thousands of others in the tech sector, found themselves unemployed.

After he returned to Sydney, Ma was contacted by a former colleague and fellow Australian, Noel Gordon, who invited Him to join him and two other unemployed software engineers — the Danish brothers Jens and Lars Rasmussen — to work on a startup. Their big idea was a new type of mapping platform.

Back then, the undisputed market leader in online mapping was MapQuest, which had been acquired by the internet giant AOL in 1999 for a staggering sum at the time, $US1.1bn.

But MapQuest was clunky and lived halfway between the digital and analog worlds: a user plotting a route had to print the turn-by-turn directions on their desktop or laptop. It was a digital dinosaur, unaware of the shifting tide.

Calling themselves Where 2 Technologies, the four partners based themselves in the spare bedroom of Gordon’s apartment in the Sydney suburb of Hunters Hill and began building a Windows application program they dubbed Expedition.

The prototype had an address bar at the top, and in the center, a map of downtown San Francisco with a route along Interstate 80 over the Bay Bridge highlighted as a red line. Two location pins, in the form of US-style letterboxes on poles, marked specific locations.

“I’m actually surprised how similar it looks to what Google Maps looks like today,” says Ma.

The Where 2 crew presented this demo to Sequoia Capital, the legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm that has been bankrolling some of the biggest names in the startup world since the 1970s. Where 2 hoped to secure some seed funding and take the pressure off their dwindling personal savings and maxed-out credit cards.

But in March 2004, Yahoo Maps launched a new feature called SmartView, allowing users to conduct map-based searches for restaurants and entertainment venues. Today it’s a standard feature on all online maps, but back then, it was groundbreaking enough to spook Where 2’s investors into pulling the plug on the deal.

As a consolation prize, however, they were introduced to Google, and not just anyone at Google: they got to present their demo to Larry Page, one of Google’s co-founders.