
Spending $5k to put Zimbabwe on Street View - coderintherye
https://www.cnet.com/news/this-man-spent-5000-of-his-own-money-to-put-zimbabwe-on-street-view
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mtmail
If you want to repeat that in your neighboorhood in a smaller scale, there's
[https://www.openstreetcam.org/](https://www.openstreetcam.org/) (software
open source, content CC-BY-SA) and
[https://www.mapillary.com/](https://www.mapillary.com/) (propietary afaik,
content CC-BY-SA)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_street_view_services](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_street_view_services)

~~~
monksy
Open street cam looks pretty cool. I wonder how they're combining all of those
images. Just looked it at, they're just a sequence of images of a drive. Don't
expect a google street view like experience.

~~~
andrewharvey
It's completely depended on what people contribute, if you collect 360 images
with a 360 camera then you can get the google street view like experience. The
community contributors to Mapillary have done a lot of 360 imagery.

~~~
win2020
Do they have a guide on how to setup your rig to get best results possible?

~~~
andrewharvey
There's a forum where the community talks about capture setup
[https://forum.mapillary.com/c/contributing-and-
equipment](https://forum.mapillary.com/c/contributing-and-equipment)

It's varies a bit depending if you're capturing via car, bicycle, foot or any
other mode of transport, then again based on your budget and how much effort
you want to put into your setup.

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Gerardd
I was impatient for Street View to reach my country so I made my own back in
2014. I took photospheres of my university campus and made a website for it
using an embedded Street View container. I did it as a personal project. The
university ended up discounting a reasonable chunk of my tuition as a
recognition and for my effort! First I was taking individual photos on my DSLR
and stiching them manually then I continued the bulk using a spare Android
phone which made everything (slightly) easier (auto stiching, geo-tagged...)
but I still had to stand at each point and take 18+ photos for each
photosphere. You can check it on
[http://discoveruob.com](http://discoveruob.com)

~~~
sarcher
I really enjoyed clicking around and virtually touring the campus - especially
knowing how much work it must have been!

What a great project, glad the university recognized your effort.

~~~
Gerardd
Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed it.

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floatingatoll
While I’m glad someone found a way to turn money into happiness, this feels
like the Black Mirror future of the gig worker economy.

“We need a map of Kansas City using devices we provide you. We pay nothing up
front, nothing at completion, and no residuals for profits we earn from your
imagery. You may not keep the equipment we provide. You are responsible for
all expenses.”

Who on earth would accept that Taskrabbit?

~~~
michaelt
Presumably Google’s normal target market for the camera loans are museums,
parks, shopping centres, local government tourism departments and suchlike.

I.e. organisations that think it’ll be a useful marketing effort, or it’ll
help their customers.

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grecy
I wonder how they got gas or diesel... there is essentially none in Zimbabwe
right now. Even cooking oil is getting hard to come by as everyone is running
it as diesel in older mechanical engines (which burn it fine)

~~~
oh_sigh
There is gas and diesel - it is just expensive for everyday folk relative to
how much money they can realistically make.

If you work in SF and spend $5000 on a passion project flying to Zimbabwe, you
will have no problem affording gas.

~~~
MadTitan
Currently in Zimbabwe. It's not an issue of affordability. The country
allocates foreign currency to bring in fuel, there is a shortage of foreign
currency and the government is struggling to bring in enough fuel to meet
demand levels.

~~~
zamalek
Exactly the same as when I lived there. We had the money, but we would queue
round the block (even leaving cars unattended) waiting for the fuel to arrive.

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jarofgreen
While this is a cool project and congrats to the guy, seriously, Google can't
even cover the expenses for him and other people who do this kind of thing?
How many people do this kind of thing, and how much would it cost Google to
cover them all? How much would it cost them to cover a salary for them too,
even a basic one? Do we have any way of trying to make a reasonable guess at
that? Maybe Tawanda was aware of this and is still happy to do it, but for
that not even to be commented on in the article is kinda weird.

~~~
Jyaif
The same thing could be said about wikipedia btw: In 2018 they received 104
million dollars (of which 2.3 went to pay for the servers), so if they wanted,
they could actually get 100 million worth of content.

~~~
philipwhiuk
This is what really annoys me about Wikipedia - it begs for money like it's
going out of business but in reality the money it gets, aside from the tiny
amount that actually runs everything is basically frittered in what is little
more than fraud frankly.

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adrianN
Did he just gift the images to Google? Did he retain copyrights? Are they
available under a license that would allow inclusion into an open repository
of street view photos?

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smel
Back in 2014, a Moroccan guy did something similar, created a Street view
clone for a 10 cities in Morocco huge challenge for one person, with limited
resources: [http://carte.ma/](http://carte.ma/)

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tertius
"Google Trusted Photogapher" here.

[https://www.google.com/streetview/hire/](https://www.google.com/streetview/hire/)

Verification:
[https://goo.gl/maps/Nx9JwEB731m](https://goo.gl/maps/Nx9JwEB731m)

We can now add to Streetview instead of just adding to Google Maps. I.e. we
can create a blue line instead of just blue dots.

And a lot of us are doing it, by request, and paid. And no, Google never paid
us anything, we had to sell by ourselves and set our own prices.

So this guy will get paid, this is great PR.

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al_chemist
> Google never paid us anything

> So this guy will get paid

Who pays for that?

~~~
tertius
By businesses who want a tour of their business or of the road leading up to
it. Mostly likely just the business premises. But there are a lot of clients
in that part of the world that would want to include roads like game reserves.

* I'm South African.

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j2bax
I’d love to see the vast trail systems of the US get the street view
treatment.

~~~
ehnto
I am just impressed they are mapped at all. Not entirely reliable as trails
get changed over seasons and for maintenance and so on, but it is still
impressive to be able to get an overview of a trail system.

~~~
code_duck
I’m amazed that they went into my gym.

~~~
propogandist
The business owner can hire authorized streetview photographers to upload
images to Google Maps' native street view experience. It exists to strengthen
Google's moat and incentivize SMBs to spend more $ with Google.

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xte
While I may comprehend that any of those contributors must know and well
understand a thing: that's a PROPRIETARY service, you pay but you do not
really own ANYTHING after.

So consider OpenStreetMaps (they also have a kind of streetview project) or
any other kind of FREE project in witch you invest money and after co-own the
data.

