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Street views was actually started as a Stanford project called CityBlock. LOLOL, business analysis? The idea was entirely an engineering nerd project. We wante

Street views was actually started as a Stanford project called CityBlock. LOLOL, business analysis? The idea was entirely an engineering nerd project. We wanted to index the physical world, just like the book scanning project and a bunch of similar ideas. Source: I helped build one of the original street views vans as my 20% project.

tucosan 4y ago
Prototyping and building this must have been a fun experience. It must be amazing to see a moonshot like this to become a real product that is used millions of people every day. I find street view to be tremendously helpful in many situations. It's a shame that my fellow German citizens are so scared of new tech, that Google had to stop indexing German streets.
- BrandoElFollito 4y ago
  I was always surprised how they were afraid of credit cards tracking everything they do. OTOH in France we have people afraid of (someone, not sure whom) tracking their life through the computerized power meters...
xargon7 4y ago
It was an interesting mix of "let's do a cool thing" and "imagine what can be done with this data!" Early on someone mentioned that NYC doesn't actually know for sure where all of the fire hydrants are _actually_ placed, and it may be possible to automatically extract the locations from the collected data. More obviously, looking for the address signs of addresses that are expected along a street can dramatically improve driving directions. Of course, the biggest business value was being able to generate the actual, underlying street maps without having to purchase that from companies that had already digitized and driven the streets.
mistrial9 4y ago
who was the berkeley guy at the corner of Kittredge with all the SSDs then?
o10449366 4y ago
Digression, but this is my current complaint at my job at a Big Tech Company: we're now so big that we have product managers for everything that dictate what we can and can't work on and they hold a monopoly on customer data that's used to justify new product decisions. Engineers who have been around for years and started the product from the ground up, worked with customers to understand their needs, and have a good idea of what features may be valuable to them going forward are being ignored because now everything needs a business analyst to approve the idea. Some of the best products in the world came out of experimenting and just building something cool - I could never imagine many products that now support business analysts and product managers salaries getting the green light from them if they were pitched from scratch.
- jamal-kumar 4y ago
  I wonder how to avoid that kind of thing from happening? It's almost like big business edict is a predatory entity, like a grossly gargantuan gelatinous cube absorbing whatever it can control into it.
- orzig 4y ago
  It's absolutely possible to be both rigorous and risk-tolerant at the same time. It's mostly about ever-expanding investments. Here's a good example from a seed stage investor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi3PiZsIfBU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi3PiZsIfBU
the-rc 4y ago
The very first StreetView was a relatively slow-paced one-two hour tape with Larry, Marissa, Schwim (I think) and a fourth (?) person driving around town in 2000 or 2001. Larry then took the tape to Stanford and a while later the project got funded by Google. Source: I saw the footage years ago. If the project hadn't became what it became, the VHS video would have been a truly unremarkable one like millions of others before and after it.
- anthk 4y ago
  There was a Virtual Paris for Mac which was the same as Street View. Also, Encarta and such had 3D views too.

tucosan 4y ago

Prototyping and building this must have been a fun experience. It must be amazing to see a moonshot like this to become a real product that is used millions of people every day. I find street view to be tremendously helpful in many situations. It's a shame that my fellow German citizens are so scared of new tech, that Google had to stop indexing German streets.

BrandoElFollito 4y ago
I was always surprised how they were afraid of credit cards tracking everything they do. OTOH in France we have people afraid of (someone, not sure whom) tracking their life through the computerized power meters...

xargon7 4y ago

It was an interesting mix of "let's do a cool thing" and "imagine what can be done with this data!" Early on someone mentioned that NYC doesn't actually know for sure where all of the fire hydrants are _actually_ placed, and it may be possible to automatically extract the locations from the collected data. More obviously, looking for the address signs of addresses that are expected along a street can dramatically improve driving directions. Of course, the biggest business value was being able to generate the actual, underlying street maps without having to purchase that from companies that had already digitized and driven the streets.

mistrial9 4y ago

who was the berkeley guy at the corner of Kittredge with all the SSDs then?

o10449366 4y ago

Digression, but this is my current complaint at my job at a Big Tech Company: we're now so big that we have product managers for everything that dictate what we can and can't work on and they hold a monopoly on customer data that's used to justify new product decisions. Engineers who have been around for years and started the product from the ground up, worked with customers to understand their needs, and have a good idea of what features may be valuable to them going forward are being ignored because now everything needs a business analyst to approve the idea. Some of the best products in the world came out of experimenting and just building something cool - I could never imagine many products that now support business analysts and product managers salaries getting the green light from them if they were pitched from scratch.

jamal-kumar 4y ago
I wonder how to avoid that kind of thing from happening? It's almost like big business edict is a predatory entity, like a grossly gargantuan gelatinous cube absorbing whatever it can control into it.
orzig 4y ago
It's absolutely possible to be both rigorous and risk-tolerant at the same time. It's mostly about ever-expanding investments. Here's a good example from a seed stage investor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi3PiZsIfBU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi3PiZsIfBU

the-rc 4y ago

The very first StreetView was a relatively slow-paced one-two hour tape with Larry, Marissa, Schwim (I think) and a fourth (?) person driving around town in 2000 or 2001. Larry then took the tape to Stanford and a while later the project got funded by Google. Source: I saw the footage years ago. If the project hadn't became what it became, the VHS video would have been a truly unremarkable one like millions of others before and after it.

anthk 4y ago
There was a Virtual Paris for Mac which was the same as Street View. Also, Encarta and such had 3D views too.