Ben Silbermann Quotes

Google Earth has become a little bit of an icon in our society. You get on maps and you wanna see what the quality of the road's like, you go on Google Maps.

Satellite imagery is the only way we can map the looting patterns effectively.

Google has been an amazing benefit for our business. People understand the whole world of mapping and want to do more than not get lost. They want to do spatial analytics. It's been fantastic for us.

In this new age of GPS, Google Earth and multidimensional digital maps, mapping is suddenly hugely relevant again.

A location-aware tablet will let us use what's called geodesign to compose participatory, what-if scenarios onsite, using maps that several people can share - something we could always do with paper but that's been a challenge with digital maps in the field.

Step one of Street View was to get the pictures in place - in a few short years, we've gotten used to the idea that nearly any place on earth can now be visited as a set of images on Google.

You just pull back for hundreds of miles using the satellite imagery, and all of a sudden this invisible world become visible. You're actually able to see settlements and tombs - and even things like buried pyramids - that you might not otherwise be able to see.

ArcGIS includes a Living Atlas of the World. It's like a large living library of geographic information.

Google Earth is an incredible resource because from hundreds of miles in space, we can zoom in, and we can find things. Everyone always looks for their house first. That is the tip of the iceberg with remote sensing.

GIS started on mainframe computers; we could get one map every five to 10 hours, and if we made a mistake, it could take longer. In the early '90s, when people started buying PCs, we migrated to desktop software.

GIS is waking up the world to the power of geography, this science of integration, and has the framework for creating a better future.

I do want to emphasize that we've seen an explosion in the use of Google Maps and Google Earth for education. The earth is a special place. It is our home and it's why we're all here. And the ability to see what's really going on the earth, the good stuff and the bad stuff, at the level that you can, is phenomenal.

I have high hopes that GIS will become increasingly relevant for landscape architects as we make the tools easier to use for the design process of just inventory and mapping.

Oh my goodness gracious, what you can buy off the Internet in terms of overhead photography. A trained ape can know an awful lot of what is going on in this world, just by punching on his mouse, for a relatively modest cost.

Before doing fieldwork in Middle Egypt, I analyzed satellite imagery to determine exactly where I wanted to go. Within three weeks, I found about 70 sites. If I had approached this as a traditional foot survey, it would have taken me three and a half years.

We're using satellites to help map and model cultural features that could never be seen on the ground because they're obscured by modernization, forests, or soil.

Mapping and visualization is a huge area of work and is of interest to many people. We're working on reinventing a new kind of 3D cartography to make it easier to tell stories with 3D maps.

GIS is being influenced by and integrating with all kinds of new innovations such as faster computing, big data, the cloud, smart devices, and distributed processing.

Web GIS allows us to take our systems of record - our traditional server and desktop technologies - and integrate them, bringing them together into a system of systems.

Bringing GIS into schools gets the kids very excited and indirectly teaches them different components of STEM education. That's been illustrated at school after school.

Our intention and aspiration is to continue building out thematic information about every subject - basemaps, imagery, demographics, landscape data, etc. - so anyone can use it to access thousands of authoritative maps.

In Google's world, public space is just something that stands between your house and the well-reviewed restaurant that you are dying to get to.

GIS is the only technology that actually integrates many different subjects using geography as its common framework.

We emphasise the features on satellite maps by adding colours to farmland, urban structures, archaeological sites, vegetation and water.

Digital Globe is, I think, a really great company. And it's had its virtual monopoly in the area where it is.