Cquay

In 1990, the world was watching who would take internet mapping to the next level from Mapquest. Until 9/11 and subsequently Google Maps, it could have been Cquay's Common Ground.

9/11 caused major ripples which sank small businesses searching for funding. Cquay experienced difficulties finding paying customers for a cool, but non-essential service. Google recognized this and put their map product out there free to consumers. Once they achieved dominance they monetized & cornered the market.

As Interface Tools Team Lead my role was to build the UI Toolkit to view the maps generated by the service. These were not pre-rendered images like MapQuest. There was a full object database in the background from which the images were rendered in real time.

I developed a flexible toolkit of object oriented components which could be laid out and rendered in collabsible toolbars, inside or outside the map frame.

I was in my element!