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.
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!
> 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?
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
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. )
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.
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.
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...
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.
https://beemaps.com/developers?tab=playground
you can also view some of the data generated by the Bee in there.
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?
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"...
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.
Now I go for Panoramax...with my phone stuck to the front window of my car or bike.