Mapping Amazing: Bee Maps

Yeah 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.

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.

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.

API Playground is here

https://beemaps.com/developers?tab=playground

you can also view some of the data generated by the Bee in there.

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.

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!

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"...

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.

>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!