Lars Rasmussen is a member of Google's technical staff, based in the Sydney office, and with his brother Jens is co-founder of the Google Wave effort. In early 2003, the brothers co-founded a mapping start-up, Where 2 Technologies, which was acquired by Google in October of 2004. Lars joined Google and worked as one of the lead engineers in the team that turned this acquisition into Google Maps, now used by millions of people around the world. Lars holds a Ph.D. in theoretical computer science from the University of California at Berkeley. He has possibly the world's least developed sense of direction, and consistently types faster than he can spell.