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Given the traffic snarls and developing infrastructure, I would love to know how many months or years it ll take them to get this done. My other concern is whet

by ankimal 15y ago

Given the traffic snarls and developing infrastructure, I would love to know how many months or years it ll take them to get this done. My other concern is whether they ll be able to cope up with India's changing infrastructure. New bridges, buildings, housing complexes come up every year, traffic patterns change to accomodate the same and most big cities have a metro under construction. Changing maps is one thing, but re-mapping street view is quite another.

petervandijck 15y ago
Interestingly, I was discussing this with some people while in India two years ago. It turns out that a lot of houses don't really have addresses. A lot of alleys don't have street names. A lot of buildings just get built, and there's not always an official address for them. So it would definitely be interesting, yes.
- tekgo 15y ago
  Google actually came up with landmark-based directions specifically for India( http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/go-thataway-google-maps-india-learns-to.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/go-thataway-google-ma... ), but if you do not have an official address I guess one would have to settle for a nearby intersection or business.
ajju 15y ago
The good thing for a project like this in India is that labor is relatively cheap. Hiring semi-skilled technicians / drivers to drive the street view camera van will probably not cost much. Back of the envelope calculation: ~3M Km of roads (urban and rural) - Assuming avg speed of 30KM/hr, that is 100,000 man hours of work just to record the data. - Double the estimate to accomodate 2 person teams (driver and technician). 200,000 man hours. - 50 Rs/hour on average would probably be decent pay for a driver/technician that's semiskilled. (Rs 12000/month with an 8 hour workday). 50 Rs > $1. So, let's say $1 per hour. - Total cost for recording ALL urban and rural roads excluding state and national highways: $200,000 That's probably around the annual salary of one Sr. engineer at Google in Mountain View. They could afford to do it multiple times a year. This doesn't consider the cost of processing this data but Google being Google, I am sure they have automated tools that convert these recordings into Street view quite cheaply. Computing power is their cheapest resource. Improving the estimate: - There's also the cost of equipment. It would take 1000 teams 12 working days (~100 hours) each to record data. If you have a little more than a month you only need 333 teams, and so on. Also I bet they are only doing cities first, so they could probably do with 100 teams at a time. Let's say the equipment is USD $2K per team. That's $200,000 in equipment. I am guessing they can do it for much cheaper since they are likely reusing equipment across countries. - There's the cost of renting the auto-rickshaws. Looks like the 'retail' rate for an auto-rickshaw trip is about Rs 12 per KM (all inclusive) for short trips. Since we are paying the driver separately, 12 per KM may be excessive for the rickshaw + gas, but let's use it anyway. That's Another Rs 12,00,000 = ~$24,000 Updated total cost: $424,000 Imagine if you were a startup in India circa 2007 when street view launched in the U.S. If you had the technical chops to build tools for street view, it would have been a no-brainer to invest this kind of money and get the data. Google, Microsoft or Yahoo would have happily paid 10x to acquire the startup.
- gt5050 15y ago
  There is already a startup doing somewhat similar http://www.vidteq.com/ http://www.vidteq.com/
  - ajju 15y ago
    That's great. Didn't know that.
- jfeldstein2 15y ago
  You know they developed self-driving cars for a reason, right?
  - ajju 15y ago
    If they use them in India and have the same safety record (no at-fault accidents), I'll start suspecting they have sentient A.I.
  - geekzgalore 15y ago
    You need to check Indian traffic to understand why self-driven cars cannot be used.
yummyfajitas 15y ago
I haven't been here that long, but from what I've seen, Google doesn't even have up to date maps in India. I went jogging a few days ago, and ran into what google maps described as a dead end. The road didn't stop - it just continued through some "undocumented housing" in dirt road form. Google has their work cut out for them.

by ankimal 15y ago

petervandijck 15y ago

Interestingly, I was discussing this with some people while in India two years ago. It turns out that a lot of houses don't really have addresses. A lot of alleys don't have street names. A lot of buildings just get built, and there's not always an official address for them. So it would definitely be interesting, yes.

tekgo 15y ago
Google actually came up with landmark-based directions specifically for India( http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/go-thataway-google-maps-india-learns-to.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/go-thataway-google-ma... ), but if you do not have an official address I guess one would have to settle for a nearby intersection or business.

ajju 15y ago

The good thing for a project like this in India is that labor is relatively cheap. Hiring semi-skilled technicians / drivers to drive the street view camera van will probably not cost much. Back of the envelope calculation: ~3M Km of roads (urban and rural) - Assuming avg speed of 30KM/hr, that is 100,000 man hours of work just to record the data. - Double the estimate to accomodate 2 person teams (driver and technician). 200,000 man hours. - 50 Rs/hour on average would probably be decent pay for a driver/technician that's semiskilled. (Rs 12000/month with an 8 hour workday). 50 Rs > $1. So, let's say $1 per hour. - Total cost for recording ALL urban and rural roads excluding state and national highways: $200,000 That's probably around the annual salary of one Sr. engineer at Google in Mountain View. They could afford to do it multiple times a year. This doesn't consider the cost of processing this data but Google being Google, I am sure they have automated tools that convert these recordings into Street view quite cheaply. Computing power is their cheapest resource. Improving the estimate: - There's also the cost of equipment. It would take 1000 teams 12 working days (~100 hours) each to record data. If you have a little more than a month you only need 333 teams, and so on. Also I bet they are only doing cities first, so they could probably do with 100 teams at a time. Let's say the equipment is USD $2K per team. That's $200,000 in equipment. I am guessing they can do it for much cheaper since they are likely reusing equipment across countries. - There's the cost of renting the auto-rickshaws. Looks like the 'retail' rate for an auto-rickshaw trip is about Rs 12 per KM (all inclusive) for short trips. Since we are paying the driver separately, 12 per KM may be excessive for the rickshaw + gas, but let's use it anyway. That's Another Rs 12,00,000 = ~$24,000 Updated total cost: $424,000 Imagine if you were a startup in India circa 2007 when street view launched in the U.S. If you had the technical chops to build tools for street view, it would have been a no-brainer to invest this kind of money and get the data. Google, Microsoft or Yahoo would have happily paid 10x to acquire the startup.

gt5050 15y ago
There is already a startup doing somewhat similar http://www.vidteq.com/ http://www.vidteq.com/
- ajju 15y ago
  That's great. Didn't know that.
jfeldstein2 15y ago
You know they developed self-driving cars for a reason, right?
- ajju 15y ago
  If they use them in India and have the same safety record (no at-fault accidents), I'll start suspecting they have sentient A.I.
- geekzgalore 15y ago
  You need to check Indian traffic to understand why self-driven cars cannot be used.

yummyfajitas 15y ago

I haven't been here that long, but from what I've seen, Google doesn't even have up to date maps in India. I went jogging a few days ago, and ran into what google maps described as a dead end. The road didn't stop - it just continued through some "undocumented housing" in dirt road form. Google has their work cut out for them.