A Landmark Achievement

IN AN ATTEMPT TO REAFFIRM its status as the primary species of this planet, mankind has been trying to civilize its surroundings.

- Deepak Visweswaraiah

We all want to make the world a smaller place, all familiar and lit up. Imagine being in a completely new country or, better still, wilderness and still being able to find a marked landmark. This was unthinkable just over a decade ago.

Bill Kilday’s absorbing, behind-the-scenes technology memoir Never Lost Again relays the story of the digital mapping revolution that has changed the way we navigate. Losing our way, almost a daily hardship back in time is now next to unimaginable.

An early employee of the company Keyhole, which would later be acquired by Google, Kilday is a worthy candidate to trace the astounding journey of the mapping revolution. A revolution, that he writes, continues today.

As the marketing director at Keyhole, Kilday travelled cross-country selling the company’s mapping technology EarthViewer. Concurrently, the startup’s engineers laid the foundation of the critical back-end infrastructure to manage terabytes of detailed satellite images. These images were strung together to create a montage – a process that eventually became the heart of the taken-for-granted innovation we now know as Google Maps.