Mapping startup Hivemapper will launch a new dashcam later this 12 months that its co-founder believes will velocity up efforts to claw market share away from Google.
The new Hivemapper Bee digital camera, revealed Wednesday, is a part of the corporate’s years-long push to decentralize mapping and make map knowledge extra reasonably priced and accessible. Hivemapper additionally hopes the digital camera will assist it broaden past its core buyer base of ride-hail and supply drivers to extra house owners of company fleets, doubtlessly supercharging its capability to seize more energizing, extra beneficial mapping knowledge.
The firm has already made notable progress utilizing knowledge captured from its earlier dashcam fashions mounted within the vehicles of hundreds of ride-hail and supply drivers. Hivemapper introduced, along with the new digital camera, that its group of contributors have mapped 8 million kilometers (5 million miles) of roads worldwide in 16 months — a milestone reached 4 occasions sooner than it took Google to cross with Street View, in accordance with the corporate. Hivemapper has stated it desires to cross 10 million kilometers by early 2024, and tells Ztoog it expects to hit that mark in April.
In common, the Bee is supposed to be a extra hands-off or “passive” digital camera. It’s weather-sealed and extra sturdy, to the purpose that drivers can mount it exterior their automobile if they need. It additionally not wants to hook up with the Hivemapper smartphone app to add footage to the corporate’s servers. The Bee does extra on-device processing to the information it captures, too. All that is meant ought to make the Bee extra enticing to company fleet clients, CEO Ariel Seidman tells Ztoog in an interview.
The Bee is best than Hivemapper’s present cameras in different methods, with a bigger GPS antenna for extra exact positioning, and the power to shoot 4K footage at 30 frames per second. Preorders start at present and Hivemapper plans to begin transport the digital camera within the third quarter of this 12 months. A model with an LTE chip will price $549 whereas a WiFi-only variant runs $449.
“Google can only refresh their maps once a year, once every couple of years” due the high-tech, high-cost nature of its autos, Gabe Nelson, Hivemapper’s head of operations tells Ztoog in an interview. He says Hivemapper’s crowdsource group can “build up the kind of raw materials of mapmaking far, far faster.” Nelson says he expects that charge to speed up as it really works by a backorder record of greater than 15,000 clients and begins transport the Bee.
But Hivemapper isn’t simply making an attempt to seize as lots of the world’s roads as potential. “The holy grail is frequency,” Seidman says. “If you go to, let’s say, Scottsdale, Arizona right now and you pick a random spot. We probably see that 80 to 100 times a year. Google sees that maybe once every 14 to 18 months.”
Not solely does that enhance the mapping knowledge that Hivemapper turns round and sells to clients, nevertheless it additionally opens up new enterprise alternatives. Late final 12 months the corporate launched Scout, a “location monitoring tool” that lets clients “mark” a location and obtain photos each time a Hivemapper driver passes by. Customers may even place a “bounty” on places to incentivize drivers to go by it extra typically.
The clients of Hivemapper’s cameras must be higher off with the Bee, too, in accordance with the corporate. Hivemapper compensates contributors with a token referred to as Honey, which not too long ago obtained listed to Coinbase’s change. The firm says the Bee will create higher-quality map knowledge that’s much less prone to be rejected upon submission. (Hivemapper lets folks do high quality assurance checks on map knowledge and carry out labeling in change for Honey tokens, and likewise makes use of AI to do a few of this as nicely.) And making the digital camera a bit extra autonomous — like auto-uploading knowledge — means contributors will likely be much less prone to neglect to do it themselves.
Of course, pitching folks on being rewarded with tokens is just not as straightforward now as it was a number of years in the past when the web3 craze briefly took maintain. Nelson says there are many individuals who wish to purchase a Hivemapper digital camera for different causes.
“I think what we’ve really tried to say is, look, if you’re a professional driver, if you’re an Uber driver or Lyft driver or Amazon flex driver, and you already need this dashcam device because it provides you safety and other capabilities, then this is a great device because it provides those capabilities and it also rewards with this token,” Nelson says. “For a lot of them, they actually enjoy the experience of building something that they can see themselves.”
It’s a step again from the corporate’s rah-rah discuss in 2022 of the token creating “loyalty” and “passion,” although an comprehensible one.
“I think people want to be fairly rewarded for the data that they’re contributing, as they should be,” Nelson says. “But there has to be, especially in the case of a dash cam, there has to be other value utility to the driver that they’re getting above and beyond just a token.”