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Mapping startup HiveMapper will launch a new dashcam later this year, which its co-founder believes will accelerate efforts to wrest market share away from Google.
New HiveMapper B Camera, Revealed on Wednesday, part of the company’s years-long effort to decentralize mapping and make map data more affordable and accessible. HiveMapper also hopes the camera will help it expand beyond its core customer base of ride-hail and delivery drivers to more owners of corporate fleets, potentially supercharging its ability to capture fresher, more valuable mapping data. Will do.
The company has already made significant progress using data from its previous dashcam models installed in the cars of thousands of ride-hail and delivery drivers. HiveMapper, in conjunction with the new camera, announced that its community of contributors has mapped 8 million kilometers (5 million miles) of roads around the world in 16 months – a milestone comparable to that surpassed by Google with Street View. Has reached four times faster. company. Hivemapper has said it wants to surpass 10 million kilometers by early 2024, and tells TechCrunch it expects to reach that figure in April.
In general, B means a more practical or “passive” camera. It is weather-resistant and extra robust, to the extent that drivers can mount it outside their car if they wish. It also no longer needs to be connected to the HiveMapper smartphone app to upload footage to the company’s servers. Bee also does more on-device processing of the data it captures. CEO Ariel Seidman told TechCrunch in an interview that this is all to make the B more attractive to corporate fleet customers.
The B is superior to HiveMapper’s existing cameras in other ways, with a larger GPS antenna for more accurate positioning and the ability to shoot 4K footage at 30 frames per second. Pre-orders begin today and HiveMapper plans to begin shipping the cameras in the third quarter of this year. The version with an LTE chip will cost $549 while the Wi-Fi only version will cost $449.
“Google can only refresh its maps once a year, versus once every two years, because of the high-tech, high-cost nature of its vehicles,” Gabe Nelson, head of operations at HiveMapper, told TechCrunch in an interview. He says HiveMapper’s crowdsourced community can “generate raw material for map creation very quickly.” Nelson says he expects that rate to accelerate as it works through its backorder list of more than 15,000 customers and begins shipping the B.
But HiveMapper isn’t trying to capture as many of the world’s roads as possible. “The holy grail is frequency,” says Seidman. “If you, let’s say, go to Scottsdale, Arizona right now and you pick a random location. We probably see it 80 to 100 times a year. Google looks at it maybe once every 14 to 18 months.”
This not only improves the mapping data that HiveMapper sells to customers, but it also opens up new business opportunities. Late last year the company launched Scout, a “location monitoring tool” that lets customers “mark” a location and receive images every time a HiveMapper driver passes by. Customers can also offer “rewards” at locations to encourage drivers to drive by more often.
Hivemapper clients camera According to the company, the situation should be better with B also. Hivemapper compensates contributors with a token called Honey, which was recently listed on the Coinbase exchange. The company says Bee will create higher-quality map data that will be less likely to be rejected when presented. (HiveMapper lets people do quality assurance checks on map data and labeling in exchange for Honey tokens, and also uses AI to do some of it.) And making the cameras a little more autonomous—like auto- Uploading data – means contributors will be less likely to forget to do it themselves.
Of course, getting people to get rewarded with tokens is no longer as easy as it was a few years ago when the Web3 craze took hold for a while. Nelson says there are many people who want to buy the HiveMapper cameras for other reasons.
“I think what we’ve really tried to say is, look, if you’re a professional driver, if you’re an Uber driver or a Lyft driver or an Amazon Flex driver, and you already have this dashcam device. need because it gives you security and other capabilities, so it’s a great tool because it provides those capabilities and it also rewards with this token,” says Nelson. “For a lot of them, They really enjoy the experience of creating something they can see for themselves.”
This is a step back from the company’s rah-rah talk of a token in 2022 Make “Loyalty” and “passion”, however, are understandable.
“I think people want to be rewarded appropriately for the data they contribute, as they should,” says Nelson. “But there has to be, especially in the case of dash cams, there has to be other value utility for the driver that they’re getting above and beyond just a token.”
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