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GCN Home > 07/30/07 issue

Michael Jones | Geospatial Democracy

GCN interview with Michael Jones, Google Earth Chief Technologist

By Wyatt Kash and Joab Jackson

When it comes to getting new photographic equipment, most people would settle for buying a new camera. Not Google technologist Michael Jones — he has actually built his own four-megapixel digital camera. This intuitiveness also shows through in the company products and services he oversees, including Google Earth, Google Maps and the company’s local search service. Jones was formerly chief technology officer at Keyhole, the company that developed the technology used in Google Earth. He was also director of advanced graphics at SGI.

GCN: Google recently launched a street-level video-recording project for major cities, StreetView. What is this about?

JONES: We’ve been doing research for two years now on ways of capturing street-level imagery. We have high-resolution imagery captured at the street level. If you use our product and fly to San Francisco, say, and turn on the street views in Google Maps, then you put the icon there anywhere you like and you can zoom in and see the window on the restaurant. You see what time they are opened. You can see if they are closed for summer. You can go to a parking sign and see what time parking is allowed.

GCN: What technologies are you using to capture, manage and deploy these images online?

JONES: It involves many servers, which people have estimated to be tens of thousands. It is involves many data centers around the world to reduce latency to each user. It involves redundancy so the data is always online. So, basically, it is a matter of scale and configuration and software.

Something else that goes on is that the sources of imagery are changing. Ten years ago, if you wanted a high-resolution picture of Moscow, you would need to work for the Central Intelligence Agency. Now you can buy it from 20 different sources, including [those in] Moscow, France, India or China. So this idea of seeing Earth from space is no longer a military secret topic. They’re like postcards from Europe.

GCN: Google and NASA have entered a partnership to make NASA’s information available on the Internet. How is the work progressing?

JONES: There are technical challenges and logistical challenges. NASA is a federal agency with federal employees, and just the style of management is a little bit different than Google. It’s not better or worse. NASA is more like a real company, and we’re more like a bunch of graduate students.

More news on related topics: Geospatial, Web Strategies



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