Brian McClendon

Brian McClendon (born 1964) is an American software designer, developer and engineer. He was a co-founder and angel investor in Keyhole, a geospatial data visualization tool; the start-up was purchased by Google in 2004 [1][2] and later came to be known as Google Earth. Keyhole itself was spun off from another company called Intrinsic Graphics, of which McClendon was also a founder.

McClendon grew up in Lawrence, Kansas (his childhood home, Meadowbrook Apartments in Lawrence, is the default center point of Google Earth).[3]). He graduated from Lawrence High School in 1982 and from the University of Kansas in 1986 with a degree in electrical engineering. Early in his career he was 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 six issued patents, [4][5] including four for KML,[6] 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.[7]

McClendon is currently a Vice President of Engineering with Google, responsible for geo-products including Earth, Maps, Local Search, Sketchup, Moon, Ocean and Sky.

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