Brian McClendon

This site is maintained for Brian McClendon. He is currently a Research Professor at the University of Kansas and advises several startups in the local area as well as California. He has taught Startup School at KU and maintains the technology employer map of the region, Techmap Kansas.

Brian was a Vice President of Engineering with Google responsible for all geo-products including Google Maps, Streetview, Waze, Google Earth, Google Maps, Moon, Ocean and Sky from 2004-2015.

Prior to that, he a co-founder at Keyhole, a start up purchased by Google in 2004. The geospatial data visualization tool developed by Keyhole later came to be known as Google Earth. Keyhole itself was spun off from another company called Intrinsic Graphics, where he was also a co-founder.

Prior to Intrinsic, he was an Engineering Director with @Home Networks and spent 8 years with Silicon Graphics developing high-end workstation 3D graphics including GT, GTX, RealityEngine, and InfiniteReality.

He holds 40 issued patents, including 22 for KML, the XML-based language schema for expressing geographic annotation and visualization in two-dimensional maps and three-dimensional Earth browsers. KML is now an open standard for GIS data.

He made his childhood home at Meadowbrook Apartments in Lawrence, Kansas the default center point of early releases of Google Earth. Current release on the PC initially zoom to this location, and then default to the user's location of preference. He attended The University of Kansas.