David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Also listeners, quick update on my last comment. I'm on Bing Maps right now. They have an aerial feature but it is effectively satellite view, and there is not a way to rotate around your favorite building in for slightly different angles. Sad. There's just one problem with all of this, though. I bet this is why it took so long for Google to fully iron out the API business model, which is that Google and Google Maps were completely dependent on mapping data from other data providers and satellite companies. The two largest of which were Tela Atlas and NavTeq. In 2007, both of those companies got acquired. I may mix this up, but I think NavTeq got acquired by Nokia and Tela Atlas got acquired by TomTom. It maybe the other way around, but they are both very large acquisitions. They had a duopoly on satellite map and navigation data providing. They would sell their data and images to all the car companies that were putting GPS and Maps into screens in their vehicles. They would sell to the Garmin, TomTom obviously was making their own standalone GPS devices. They would sell to MapQuest, Yahoo! Maps and Google Maps. Google knows that this is a dependency that they are not too excited about. Also in early 2007, Larry and Sergey are back on the Stanford Campus where of course they were PhD students and Google was started. They meet up with someone who I assume they knew and they are friends with, who was a computer science professor, Sebastian Thrun, who at that time was a computer science professor at Stanford. He was running two important projects. One was SAIL, the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Two, was the Stanford’s team in the DARPA Challenge. He and Stanford’s team had just won the 2005 DARPA Challenge. The DARPA Challenge, was a challenge to create an autonomous vehicle that could navigate a pre setout course and terrain in the dessert. Sebastian and his lab were at the forefront of all of the things that would go into ultimately autonomous vehicles but a huge component of that is mapping navigation data all of these things. Sebastian told Larry and Sergey that he's actually in the process of—with a bunch of grad students—starting a startup to work on one aspect of this. It was going to be called Vutool. Really great product name and they had a crazy idea. Based on their work and the DARPA challenge, they knew all these things were important. They were going to drive around the streets of America with cars driven by human drivers but with big cameras on top and they were going to use these cameras to take pictures of everything and (a) that was going to have pictures of everything, but (b) it was going to be data that was going to be incredibly useful for this future of navigation, and autonomous vehicles and all of that. Which was not a thing that the public was in any way talking about that was five years out.…

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