Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Incredible engineering project. It takes a little bit of time as you would imagine, but they have to drive their cars around all of America to get it. But by October 2009, they acquired VuTool in early 2007. Back to October 2009, Google boots out NavTeq and Tela Atlas and they are official only using their own Google data for apps. I’m remembering this is when I was at the Wall Street Journal, it was right around then that they open up the business side of the Google Maps API and they start charging to license out the map’s API. Continuing Ben’s quest of playing with mapping software in real time while doing the episode, there’s a really cool feature you can do. Because these cars are still actively driving around all over the place, capturing all this data, where you can actually in Street View go and change the year that you are looking at. In the top left corner, if you hover over the little clock, you can adjust—I’m on Mercer right now, in Seattle—from 2015 to 2019. Even in those few years, it’s crazy to see how much the city gets built up and how much that road changes. I think on average, roads tend to have four or five years of historical data there. But it is like the coolest thing to go in this time machine and look at what they captured today versus what they captured—I can go back to 2014 over here. It’s wild to watch the change over time. I didn’t know you could do that. That’s really cool.…

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