Biography | John Hanke — The Mountain View Campus Where Earth Viewer Became Google Earth

Google announced the acquisition of Keyhole Corp. from Mountain View on 27 October 2004.

John Hanke was Keyhole's co-founder and CEO. The firm's Earth Viewer software, funded in part by Sony, NVIDIA, and the CIA venture arm In-Q-Tel, let a user fly from orbit to a street corner.

Keyhole itself sat in Mountain View, a few blocks from Google. A precise early street address is poorly attested in public filings, and the 1100 La Avenida parcel later went to housing.

The work after the sale happened on this campus. Google's headquarters at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway — the Googleplex — had just consolidated most of the company's Mountain View operations.

All 29 Keyhole employees joined Google. Hanke became director, then vice president, of product management for the Geo division: Earth, Maps, Street View, SketchUp, Panoramio.

On 28 June 2005 Google launched Google Earth, a free 3-D earth browser built on Keyhole technology. Hanke, listed as general manager of the Keyhole group inside Google, described it as a browser for the planet.

Servers buckled. Downloads hit hundreds of thousands on day one. The public launch is the date this pin holds.

CNN and other networks had already used Keyhole fly-throughs during the 2003 Iraq invasion. Google's version made the same gesture free.

The campus a visitor sees now is larger than the 2005 site. The Amphitheatre Parkway address is still the public front door of the company that bought the map.

Photo: Grendelkhan, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (Googleplex, 2015). Portrait of Hanke: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (2016).