

Google's Street View starts mapping India - Garbage
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gFoWVQF7xBpDXRIkUvRVkhqVT1ZQ?docId=CNG.3ae2c53954517f8b64ed19d65a6b92c0.771

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ankimal
Given the traffic snarls and developing infrastructure, I would love to know
how many months or years it ll take them to get this done. My other concern is
whether they ll be able to cope up with India's changing infrastructure. New
bridges, buildings, housing complexes come up every year, traffic patterns
change to accomodate the same and most big cities have a metro under
construction. Changing maps is one thing, but re-mapping street view is quite
another.

~~~
ajju
The good thing for a project like this in India is that labor is relatively
cheap. Hiring semi-skilled technicians / drivers to drive the street view
camera van will probably not cost much. Back of the envelope calculation:

~3M Km of roads (urban and rural)

\- Assuming avg speed of 30KM/hr, that is 100,000 man hours of work just to
record the data.

\- Double the estimate to accomodate 2 person teams (driver and technician).
200,000 man hours.

\- 50 Rs/hour on average would probably be decent pay for a driver/technician
that's semiskilled. (Rs 12000/month with an 8 hour workday). 50 Rs > $1. So,
let's say $1 per hour.

\- Total cost for recording ALL urban and rural roads excluding state and
national highways: $200,000

That's probably around the annual salary of one Sr. engineer at Google in
Mountain View.

They could afford to do it multiple times a year.

This doesn't consider the cost of processing this data but Google being
Google, I am sure they have automated tools that convert these recordings into
Street view quite cheaply. Computing power is their cheapest resource.

Improving the estimate:

\- There's also the cost of equipment. It would take 1000 teams 12 working
days (~100 hours) each to record data. If you have a little more than a month
you only need 333 teams, and so on. Also I bet they are only doing cities
first, so they could probably do with 100 teams at a time. Let's say the
equipment is USD $2K per team. That's $200,000 in equipment. I am guessing
they can do it for much cheaper since they are likely reusing equipment across
countries.

\- There's the cost of renting the auto-rickshaws. Looks like the 'retail'
rate for an auto-rickshaw trip is about Rs 12 per KM (all inclusive) for short
trips. Since we are paying the driver separately, 12 per KM may be excessive
for the rickshaw + gas, but let's use it anyway. That's Another Rs 12,00,000 =
~$24,000

Updated total cost: $424,000

Imagine if you were a startup in India circa 2007 when street view launched in
the U.S. If you had the technical chops to build tools for street view, it
would have been a no-brainer to invest this kind of money and get the data.
Google, Microsoft or Yahoo would have happily paid 10x to acquire the startup.

~~~
jfeldstein2
You know they developed self-driving cars for a reason, right?

~~~
ajju
If they use them in India and have the same safety record (no at-fault
accidents), I'll start suspecting they have sentient A.I.

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bgraves
I love Street View and cannot believe I'm living in a time and place in
history that makes it possible to see such a massive amount of culture and
everyday life from virtually anywhere in the world.

One question I've had since Street View was first released is how does this
make business sense for Google? I can see how it relates to Google's stated
mission statement ("to organize the world's information and make it
universally accessible and useful"). But how can Google justify spending vast
amounts of cash on what seems to be a glorified pet project? Is it simply a
desire to build the best mapping service, thereby attracting visitors and
eventually generating advertising revenue?

btw, I'm not trolling or flaming -- it's been a genuine curiosity of mine for
years now.

~~~
tsycho
I don't have an answer to your actual question about Google's motivations
here, but I do think Street View is valuable, and what's genuinely valuable
for users, eventually leads to money for the provider.

However, I am genuinely curious why you had to qualify your very reasonable
question with a "I am not trolling or flaming". I have noticed many other
commenters do this recently, and don't understand the need for qualifying
yourself if you have a genuine question.

Btw, I am not trolling or... ;)

~~~
bgraves
Yes, I agree that it's valuable and will eventually lead to revenue. Perhaps
the "mystery" stops right there.

Sometimes it can be difficult to clearly communicate in short forum-style
posts. I don't always qualify my posts, but in this case, I didn't want HN
readers to think my posts boiled down to ripping on this Google Street View
announcement. I should let my posts speak for themselves and work on being
more concise. ;)

I feel like there's been an increase in this type of behavior since points
were removed from individual posts.

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jabo
Those "tri-cycles" that the articles mentions are called "autos" in India.
They are usually used as taxis. It's interesting how Google chose to use them
rather than a car! A good example of localization!

~~~
ankimal
Wait, I thought the tri-cycles were cycle rickshaws.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_rickshaw>

Now those babies will get you through all the back-alleys and streets in no
time. The only problem would be mounting their camera on it. I think they ve
solved harder problems.

~~~
pequ
IIRC, what they call auto (or auto rikshaw) is the motorized rikshaw. Both are
tri-cycle.

~~~
xtacy
Yes, they're called auto/auto rickshaw. In some parts of the country, autos
(drivers) are notorious for their road navigation skills.

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varunsrin
yes mapping India will prove to be quite the challenge - there are a lot of
roads and alleys that are undocumented. Interestingly, the street my old house
was on never shows up in Google, shows up on Yahoo (but is unnamed) & shows up
named on Bing. I've noticed such discrepancies with other small streets and
alleys as well

Which leads me to wonder - how do companies gather map data (as in street
names, building names etc) ? Do they do it manually or parse existing maps?

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pitdesi
This is very interesting, and I LOVE that Google is doing it. I use google
maps to make sure that a rickshaw/taxi driver isn't ripping me off by going
the wrong/long way. It has come in handy for me several times in India.

The real trouble in India is addresses. When I lived in India my official
address was 3rd Floor Pran Vijay / Near H K House Lane / Opposite Bata
Showroom / Income Tax Colony / Ashram Road / Navrangpura Ahmedabad-380009

How the hell will Gmaps figure that out? Will we just start using lat/long
coordinates?

~~~
Apocryphon
Income Tax Colony?

~~~
bdhe
_Income Tax Colony?_

Lot of companies in India both public and private, including the govt. have
subsidized housing adjacent to the office buildings. They're often called
colonies. A lot of the times, these subsidized housing options are open to the
public as well, maybe at higher rates. This might be one instance relating to
the IT (Income Tax) Dept.

