Google Maps – The Australian Co-Inventor, Noel Gordon

Co-Inventor of Google Maps – Noel Gordon Full Interview

Here is the long interview.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kb4NHfeIAnM

For my big assignment this year in Year 6, I had to choose a great Australian. I interviewed Australian Noel Gordon, who is the co-inventor of Google Maps. He is an incredibly inspiring person who has made a huge difference to our world. Imagine a world without Google Maps, what would it be like? I don’t know because I have had Google Maps my whole life.

I have done a lot of research and I know maps have advanced so much in just 50 years. It went from paper maps, to navigators like the TomTom, to websites that took 10 minutes to load, to what we have now. Google Maps today is so awesome and fast and it came from four great people, Noel Gordon, Stephen Ma and the brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen.

For this assignment, I interviewed two of the four inventors, Noel Gordon and Lars Rasmussen.

Noel explained to me that we did not always have maps like we do today for free on our laptops and mobile phones. Just before I was born 11 years ago, people had to deal with a slow reality of going to a PC and entering your navigation details, making yourself a cup of coffee, then coming back to your computer only to find you have another 5 minutes of waiting for your next map to load.

My favourite quote from my interview with Noel was:

“If you have tenacity and if you have self-belief, it’s amazing what you can achieve.”
Noel Gordon

I love that quote because it is so incredibly inspirational. If you put your heart and soul into whatever you are doing, if you believe in yourself and if you have tenacity, then you can achieve so much. Even if you don’t succeed, you learn from your mistakes and you can try again.

Later on I will post my other Skype interview with Lars.

Ruby