Google Maps – The Australian Co-Inventor, Noel Gordon
Co-Inventor of Google Maps – Noel Gordon Full Interview
Here is the long interview.
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.
When I found images of some old maps, I assumed they had been exaggerated to make them look worse then they really were!
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.
After the interview Noel told me of a special moment that happened just before he and Lars decided to start the business. He and Lars were walking around Newtown, Sydney, having another conversation about if he should quit work and do their mapping startup, when they read a quote someone had written in chalk on the footpath:
When people say you are going to fail and give you the reasons why, just ignore them and go on and do it regardless.
They looked at each and said “Let’s do it”. If only the chalk writer could know the impact of their words.
There are many great videos about Lars on youtube, that I watched.
There are no videos about our Australian Noel Gordon on youtube. I am going to fix that 🙂
Meeting Noel Gordon outside the Google Office in Sydney
Google Street View is not always done by cars!
Noel and I on the top floor balcony of the Google Building in Pyrmont, Sydney
The Google Offices are so cool!
I hope you like my videos!
Later on I will post my other Skype interview with Lars.
I just finished my first photo album! My mum has always been the photographer on our family holidays, but this time I decided I would be the one who takes the photos and captures the moments.
During our last school holidays in April, my family and I went to Kangaroo Island. It was a great place to take a few snaps, but even these great photos don’t do this gorgeous destination justice. Many of my photos were taken at Kangaroo Island but not all of them, as you will see, Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide are also gorgeous places to take photos.
Kangaroo Island, Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide were the perfect places to take a few nice shots for my Year 6 Photography Assignment. Every time I saw something pretty, interesting, cute or just plain random, I would take a photo. As this happened every day, I ended up taking more than just a few. All of those photos really accumulated! I took thousands of photos and I had to go through them all to choose my favourite 26.
I really enjoyed the Photography Assignment and I am proud of the end result. I learnt that if you take a lot of photos, there will be some good ones. My favourite part of this assignment was looking through all of the photos. It was fun editing them too.
The program I was using to edit most of the photos is called Adobe Lightroom. The program has many cool features such as changing the colour, exposure and general photo properties. The main purpose of Lightroom is to change the overall image such as lighting.
For specific parts of the image I needed Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop is a lot harder to use than Lightroom, but it was able to do a few things which I couldn’t do in Lightroom. I used Photoshop for two of the final. I used it to make images have a specific area in colour and the rest black and white, like “A Pear of Eyes” or “A Beacon in the Dark”. Overall, both programs are amazing for editing photos but only if you know how to use them!
There were a few bumps in the road when I was doing my Photography Assignment. There were three main problems which I encountered. The first problem was having to sort through my thousands of photos. I took a quick look and deleted all of the obvious bad ones, like black screens which were accidents. This seemingly simple task took forever! Then, I had to choose which photos I wanted in which category, which brings me to my second problem.
My favourite photos were Flagged and then I had to categorise them into 20 groups such as Shapes, Colour, Portrait and many more. I didn’t know how to categorise my photos without having too many in one folder and not enough in another. Some photos I really wanted to keep, but the category I thought it would naturally fall under, already had the maximum amount of photos in it. I had to start being creative! For example, I had four photos of animals altogether, but I was only allowed two photos in each category, so I put two photos under the “Animals” category and moved one called “Beauty on a Mountain” into the “Colour” category. The forth animal photo I moved was the funniest, I put “Kevin Bacon and Eggs”, under the food category!
The third and final problem was the due date of the assignment. I wanted to impress my teachers so I ordered a book online to present as my assignment. Snapfish.com.au said it would take “4 to 6 business days” to arrive. I was trying to finish as fast as I could but using their software took a few days and by the time I clicked “Order”, I only had 5 days until the due date, so I thought I was fine. That is when my mum explained to me what the phrase “business days” means! I was mortified when I realised my assignment would be late.
I released my photos to Flickr and showed them to people I knew. I discovered that different people liked different photos and there was not a single image which everyone agreed was their favourite. I didn’t know which photo I should put on my front cover. I decided I would choose, “FEED ME!” as the main photo.
Here are my three favourites…
My first favourite: FEED ME!Kangaroo Island is full of amazing wildlife and we wanted to see the pelicans. We just missed feeding time at the wharf, however when we arrived the pelicans were still there and hungry for more food. I snapped one while it squawked at us. I thought it might gobble up my camera!
If you look closely you will notice that the pelican’s throat is quite tiny and I don’t understand how it fits big fish down it!
I like this photo because I captured the pelican at the perfect moment!
This is Cape de Couedic Lighthouse build in 1909 on Kangaroo Island, South Australia. If you look carefully you will see my Mum, my Dad and my big sis. This photo was taken on a stormy April afternoon. 30 seconds after this photo was taken, the heavens opened up and blessed us with hail!\
I really like this photo because it is so striking. When I was looking over all of my photos, I saw this photo and realised the red was the brightest colour in it. So I set to work and I made the rest black and white.
Kangaroo Island is the third biggest island off mainland Australia and there were a lot of roads to drive along. As we were driving along one of the many roads, I thought this would be an interesting photo with perfect symmetry. I walked into the middle of the road, took a few snaps. Voila!
This photo really stood out to me because of the perfect symmetry. I lowered the exposure to make it slightly darker, lifted the contrast and this was the end result.
So they were my favourites, but what are yours? Enjoy my album and press the Flickr *star* on the photos you like (it is the same as “Like” in Facebook).
My biggest school project is done. Our project is called the S.K Austin and it is very important. This year our teachers Mr Paton and Miss Divers told Year 5, that we all had to do a digital project. I chose to create a video documentary on the famous Australian, Dick Smith. Creating my documentary has been a huge adventure and the most work I have ever put into making a video so far. And even after all my hard work, I spent almost as much time on making changes from other peoples feedback, than I spent on editing the first version of my video!
I am very happy with the video now, however there were many problems I had to overcome. I initially planned to have the whole video finished in my 2 week school holiday break. In hindsight that was very ambitious because I took more than 1 week just to read Dick’s book called “Dick Smith’s Population Crisis” and write my script.
Figure: I read Dick’s book before my interview. I now know about the dangers of unsustainable growth.
But before I go on about all that, let’s start from the beginning. After lots of research and watching some famous Australians on YouTube, I decided on Dick Smith because I have been into so many of his stores. I wrote a list of points I needed to research and then I decided I would try to find his email to ask him for an interview. My sister Eve made this much easier than I expected. Eve had tried to get Dick to sign her petition to rename the “Canberra Airport” to “The David Warren Airport”. As luck would have it, Eve still had his mobile phone number.
That evening I called Dick and asked him for an interview and he said “yes”! He told me I needed to talk to his PA, Margo, and I did. Margo and I organised a time for me to visit his office, which is next to his house. I had so many questions I wanted to ask Dick but I knew it is was ridiculous to have over 70 questions, so I spent a whole day trying to narrow down my questions. In the end I still had about 40.
I had a mix of easy and hard questions. A short and easy one was:
“When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?”
Some of them were really long and complicated like this one:
“Barney Foran is a scientist who you interviewed in your documentary. He said that scientists have researched and believe that more growth is bad for Australia. Researchers don’t tell the government everything they really believe because they would lose their funding. Why don’t businessman like you, get together and give the funding to those scientists so they are free to publish their findings?”
I arrived at the interview early with my crew :). I had my sister Eve and Raj on the cameras and dad eating Dick’s biscuits. Then I was told by Margo that I only had 20 minutes with Dick. This was going to be a big problem when I had double the number of questions, than I had minutes. Luckily, I was the last person Dick was meeting that day so he spent lots of time talking to me and he answered all my questions which took about an hour.
Figure: Dick Smith and I before taking off. I have a lot of photos from my joy ride 🙂
Then after our long interview, Dick gave me the best experience of my life. He took me and my crew 🙂 on a ride in his helicopter from his house in Terry Hills to the beautiful Sydney harbour! It was a long and breathtaking trip.
When I got home that night I was straight to work putting all of the footage onto my computer. By the time I had finished copying all the camera footage into my Adobe Premiere Pro project, it was time for dinner. I had such an exciting evening telling my mum all about my day and what she had missed!
For the rest of my school holidays it was not as exciting. I worked on my video every day. Initially my video was almost 50 minutes but my goal was to get it down to 10 minutes, since my teacher had told us that was the best length because he said he did not want to watch 20 minute videos by 20 kids. Most of my days were from 8 am to 8 pm and I found it really hard, trying to make the video shorter. Cutting out each piece of my interview was very difficult, because I had spent hours already editing it. I felt like I was throwing my homework away!
The speaking part of my script was done in my lounge room and I had fun trying to catch the jars of peanut butter. It took about 2 hours to film but much, much longer to edit! When I felt pretty confident I was done, I put my documentary on youtube unlisted and sent it to a few friends for feedback. I had expected only a little feedback like “At 4:28 there is an audio glitch” but instead I got large blocks of feedback like “this petition is incorrect and no-one will want to sign it because all adults today will be over 80 when the population doubles, so it won’t affect them”. I was starting to understand Dick’s population problem now and why he had not received much support.
The person who sent me the longest email with the most suggestions was Geoff O’Rourke (who I have been doing a short film with). Althought I didn’t want to, I had to redo some filming and also lots more editing, to incorporate all of Geoff’s feedback. In addition the music was too boring, which meant deleting half of it and spending hours trying to find better tracks that more suited my documentary.
Once the video was done I knew a lot more about the world population problems and I wanted to help make people aware of the problem. After all, my generation is going to the most affected by this problem.
I was fast running out of time. My school holidays were over and I was still spending hours re-writing the script and trying to memorise it. By the end I was so tired. I was still editing until 11 pm on the last night! I could not have done this without my sister Eve who is my greatest inspiration and also Raj who loves pointing out every one of my mistakes.
In the end I did not succeed in getting my video down to under 10 minutes. In fact it was almost double the length it was supposed to be, but it was a huge improvement from my first 50 minute version!
Sign my two petitions
My first petition is for our Prime Minister Mr Tony Abbott and our opposition leader Mr Bill Shorten, to tell me and all Aussies what the population should be by 2060 (when I am 57 years old like you).
Figure: Prime Minister Mr Tony Abbott, what do you think the population of Australia should be by 2060? (I will be your age then).
Population growth is a world wide problem, just like climate change. I took a long time trying to work out a petition that would suit everyone. In the end this was impossible so I ended up creating two petitions, one for Australians and one that I think everyone in the world should sign:
This week I did an interview with my dad for a school assignment for my teachers, Mrs Stephanie Affleck and Mrs Justine Holden. I chose to interview my dad because he had a very different childhood to me. Continue reading →
Here is my 1st video on recycling. I hope it will encourage the people of Australia to keep our environment clean, by recycling and not littering. Continue reading →
(My Year 3 home work assignment for Miss Xie, is to interview my dad about his memories growing up. Here is what I learnt.)
As a child my dad lived on a farm in the Hunter Valley. So he got the chance to have fun with animals.
My dad was very adventurous so he liked doing things that were scary and fun, like building motor bike tracks. This sounds like fun, I’m sure I would do it too if I had the time and room. Continue reading →
