What is common between Angkor Wat, Mount Meru, Grand Canyon, Champ Elysees and the Las Vegas Strip? You can see all of them on your mobile phone without moving from your couch. One of the biggest accomplishments of Google in the past decade has been the engineering marvel called Google Maps. It comprehensively maps every nook and corner in the world. It provides travel directions. It provides public transport directions for most of the developed world. And in street view, every inch of every road in three major continents has been painstakingly made into a 360-degree photograph that users can navigate on the Internet. To take street view into massive, untapped parts of the world like India, China and Africa and to tackle the challenges there, Google needs great engineers. That is where is Manik Gupta, the Group Product Manager of Google Maps. Gupta has a B.A.Sc in Computer Engineering from the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, an MBA from the Indian School of Business at Hyderabad. Gupta started his career by co-founding and acting as the Chief Technical Officer of BuyItTogether.com. Later he went on to be the CTO for the Asia-Pacific region and the country manager for India at Norwegian software company CoTech. After a short stint at HP, he joined Google in 2008 and was responsible for maps and local search in India. Now based in California, Gupta is working on Project Ground Truth to make the most comprehensive, accurate maps.
