Brian McClendon

Brian 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 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). 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, including four 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.

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