Mapping Amazing: Bee Maps
maphappenings.comYeah I’m definitely not going to pay a subscription for a dashcam so that some company can profit off my data. This does however sound like it could be amazing if it benefited OSM instead. One of my biggest gripes with retail dashcams is that the hardware and software feels pretty universally cheap. I’d pay a premium for a good dashcam and I’d be totally ok with my data being used to improve OSM.
I've been giving street data to Mapillary before they've been chewed up by Meta.
Now I go for Panoramax...with my phone stuck to the front window of my car or bike.
If you think about it, they should give the hardware away as a lease to Uber, lyft, taxi drivers and pay them per mile. They are likely going to go the most diverse routes than say you or I that drive to work, home, the grocery store, and the park every now and then.
Yeah it's a huge waste to put that into one company's pocket instead of sharing it with OSM.
That reminds me, if anyone is in touch with the CoMaps folks... A feature to sync points and routes from my phone to my computer would be nifty. I don't record routes enough, and I often map places while I'm out without Wi-Fi.
Some of it will go to improve OSM e.g. road widths, etc.
I didn’t see that in the article - did I just miss that? Or do you have another source?
I'm playing Devil's Advocate here, but suppose this:> Yeah I’m definitely not going to pay a subscription for a dashcam so that some company can profit off my data.A dashcam is continuously recording and collecting image data. You're not "doing" anything with that data, it's just there being recycled or thrown away.
So the argument is, essentially: "Fuck you, I'd rather nobody in the world benefit than someone make a penny off of it."
Why shouldn't I get my cut, then? Why do they get to double dip? The point of the dash cam is that the data is ephemeral unless it's actually needed because something exceptional happened.
They do offer to pay you for it, which you'd know if you read the article.> Why shouldn't I get my cut, then?OP obviously read the article; please don’t be aggressive.
So you pay $20/month to be able to earn some crypto-coins they generate out of thin air to be used for...
If they aren't paying the equivalent of whatever the government allows you to deduct for 'wear and tear' on your vehicle then you're basically just subsidizing their data collection.
I don't even have an opinion on this, you do you.
--edit--
Oh, I saw down thread they're primarily a fleet services company and that explains a bunch. $20/month per car probably makes sense if you're outfitting an entire fleet and integrate it with your wonky in-house drivers' app which is barely fit for purpose. Yeah, I'm not bitter...
To phrase my point another way, an analogy might be:
Would you shout away a man who dug through your trash to pull out things he could sell?
You've already binned the trash. At that point, nothing that happens to it matters to you.
Either:
A) You lose nothing, and nobody gains something
B) You lose nothing, and somebody gains something
Picking A) is, from a philosophical viewpoint, essentially malice for the sake of it.
Like I said, you do you.
All I really have an issue with is the claim you get compensated for the time and energy you, essentially, donate to the company. If that's what you want to do with your time then by all means...
It just seems like a weird business model to me, they sell a pimped-out dash cam (fair enough) and pay some tokens (or rely on your philosophical bent) so you're willing to turn over all your data so they can repackage and sell it. To give credit where credit is due, they seem to be completely transparent with this and if the people who participate don't care then why should I?
Personally I don't mind running it and have been doing so for several years. Their app and camera/firmware have gotten a lot more stable since the early days. You can buy the camera out right and don't need to pay the monthly fee. Their tokens don't have much value but I have earned a sufficient amount when swapped to pay for the cameras over time. And if nothing more I contribute to a more uptodate map.
CTRL+F Openstreetmap
CTRL+F OSM
Nothing there. Weird since their base map looks totally like it comes from OSM. No attribution. Guess you don't need that if you have a company "Build by AI"...
The map on the heatmap is definitely OSM without attribution. I can see a bunch of features I added. That doesn't make me respect them a lot. It's not that hard to use OSM correctly, at least in this context ...
I’m struggling to figure out the upside, as a normal end-user. I don’t manage a fleet of vehicles and I’m not developing an app based on the data.
Why should I pay this company $19/month to put their hardware in my truck? It’s not clear to me that there’s navigation (I.e. a replacement for Waze/Maps) available to me via an app. I guess it records video and can be used like a dash cam, but there are much cheaper and offline alternatives. Earn their proprietary crypto coin? No thanks.
I also don't see a reason to get one as an average commuter driver. But if you have a fleet of cars as a business: delivery, in-home nursing, cleaning services, etc, then the fleet owner can use stats about their drivers and routes for optimization (or micromanaging their employees to death) or use the driver safety data and presence of reliable dash cams to negotiate better insurance policies. Meanwhile Bee Maps profits off your subscription and selling the map data to third parties.
Beemaps has what VCs crave. It's got *AI*.
You know, the AI pet rock guy made a million dollars.
In regarding the Elon quote, every Tesla has a number of cameras. Tesla the company probably has more recorded video of the roads than anybody else in the world, by a large margin.
They do, but for what ever reason they are not(or don't appear to be) using it to make machine readable maps.
From what I can work out, they are using the recorded data to create models that can identify road types in realtime, vaguely zero shot. I think musk has an aversion to "HD" maps, which explains a lot.
HD maps would solve a large number of issues for them (its how lyft and wayve do it, well partly. )
Wouldn't it be obvious if Tesla vehicles were uploading gigabytes of video over wifi? This would cause many residential plans to go over their paltry quotas.
The point in TFA is that the roads captured by Tesla are likely correlated to income.
And the users of this device are typically who?
The company that needs data everywhere, not just where teslas drive.
KartaCam 2 [1] by grab seems to be a similar piece of hardware and has a closer relationship to OSM. The KartaView app [2] allows contributions via smartphones.
[1] https://store.kartaview.org/collections/kartacam-2 [2] https://kartaview.org/
Wait, if I am providing essential data to your service, why am I paying you?
Perfect opportunity to run a project that benefits it's users (monetarily) if you only did the leg work to market that value to map consumers. And, as a consumer, you don't need the sophisticated hardware, anyway.
"you don't need the sophisticated hardware, anyway."
It depends on what kind of map you are building for which use cases and how passive you want it to be. Sure, you can use an iPhone or Android device but its not very passive (requires starting up, etc.) and it will quickly overheat when it gets hot. We tried it, and most people gave up after a few weeks given the fact that its not passive.
For most commercial fleets there is real value in the services we provide, eg monitoring, accident detection, remote video retrieval in case of accident, ELD compliance, etc.
You should read the article about rewards/incentives as it talks about that.
API Playground is here
https://beemaps.com/developers?tab=playground
you can also view some of the data generated by the Bee in there.
A number of startups did this in 2017-2020 (Scape, Mapillary, Niantic, google, apple and a a few others who's names I've forgotten)
With consumer cameras and GPS you can make pretty good maps, vaguely automatically. Keeping them up to date was mostly down to making sure that you had enough overlap in the data at different times.
The big thing for that generation of companies was AR, and making AR games accurate. This also had a feedback loop of people uploading photos/points to update the map.
With this system, I'm not sure what the point is. I don't get free maps, and frankly they are commodity now anyway.
Personally if I was going to do this again (I'm not going to because meta/google would crush me in an instant, also there isn't a market for the end product) I would pay delivery companies and security people for the data, or operate a CCTV "inteliigence" platform and generate the map as a side effect.
If you want to make your own maps, its acutally not that hard: https://github.com/cvg/Hierarchical-Localization is the more advance and less user friendly version of colmap: https://github.com/colmap/colmap
Have you ever wanted to pay a monthly subscription to give your location data and dashcam feed to a company for them to sell to other companies? Get Bee Mapping!
>Or perhaps we’ll all end up wearing some data-hoovering douche bag glasses
This guy hypes up putting cameras in every car (right at the time federal agencies are siphoning every data stream to round up non-white people) and comes up with this diss to end his pitch.
Talk about being clueless!