5 ms·

Mapping Amazing: Bee Maps

64 points by altilunium 11mo ago

NoNotTheDuo 11mo ago
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.
- mcrk 11mo ago
  Beemaps has what VCs crave. It's got *AI*.
  - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 11mo ago
    You know, the AI pet rock guy made a million dollars.
- fyrecean 11mo ago
  I also don't see a reason to get one as an average commuter driver. But if you have a fleet of cars as a business: delivery, in-home nursing, cleaning services, etc, then the fleet owner can use stats about their drivers and routes for optimization (or micromanaging their employees to death) or use the driver safety data and presence of reliable dash cams to negotiate better insurance policies. Meanwhile Bee Maps profits off your subscription and selling the map data to third parties.
Arodex 11mo ago
>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!
mbajkowski 11mo ago
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.
ww520 11mo ago
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.
- jihadjihad 11mo ago
  The point in TFA is that the roads captured by Tesla are likely correlated to income.
  - JackFr 11mo ago
    And the users of this device are typically who?
    - relaxing 11mo ago
      The company that needs data everywhere, not just where teslas drive.
- KaiserPro 11mo ago
  They do, but for what ever reason they are not(or don't appear to be) using it to make machine readable maps. 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. )
- xnx 10mo ago
  Wouldn't it be obvious if Tesla vehicles were uploading gigabytes of video over wifi? This would cause many residential plans to go over their paltry quotas.
bikelang 11mo ago
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.
- gavinray 11mo ago
  > Yeah I’m definitely not going to pay a subscription for a dashcam so that some company can profit off my data. I'm playing Devil's Advocate here, but suppose this: 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."
  - trashtensor 11mo ago
    Why shouldn't I get my cut, then? Why do they get to double dip? The point of the dash cam is that the data is ephemeral unless it's actually needed because something exceptional happened.
    - gavinray 11mo ago
      > Why shouldn't I get my cut, then? They do offer to pay you for it, which you'd know if you read the article.
      - hk__2 11mo ago
        OP obviously read the article; please don’t be aggressive.
      - UncleEntity 10mo ago
        So you pay $20/month to be able to earn some crypto-coins they generate out of thin air to be used for... 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...
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
clpwn 11mo ago
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!
KaiserPro 11mo ago
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 https://github.com/cvg/Hierarchical-Localization is the more advance and less user friendly version of colmap: https://github.com/colmap/colmap https://github.com/colmap/colmap
tcdent 10mo ago
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.
- rels25 10mo ago
  "you don't need the sophisticated hardware, anyway." 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.
rels25 10mo ago
API Playground is here https://beemaps.com/developers?tab=playground https://beemaps.com/developers?tab=playground you can also view some of the data generated by the Bee in there.
Krasnol 10mo ago
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"...
- ygra 10mo ago
  The map on the heatmap is definitely OSM without attribution. I can see a bunch of features I added. That doesn't make me respect them a lot. It's not that hard to use OSM correctly, at least in this context ...
gingermusketeer 10mo ago
KartaCam 2 [1] by grab seems to be a similar piece of hardware and has a closer relationship to OSM. The KartaView app [2] allows contributions via smartphones. [1] https://store.kartaview.org/collections/kartacam-2 https://store.kartaview.org/collections/kartacam-2 [2] https://kartaview.org/ https://kartaview.org/

64 points by altilunium 11mo ago

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.

mcrk 11mo ago
Beemaps has what VCs crave. It's got *AI*.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 11mo ago
  You know, the AI pet rock guy made a million dollars.
fyrecean 11mo ago
I also don't see a reason to get one as an average commuter driver. But if you have a fleet of cars as a business: delivery, in-home nursing, cleaning services, etc, then the fleet owner can use stats about their drivers and routes for optimization (or micromanaging their employees to death) or use the driver safety data and presence of reliable dash cams to negotiate better insurance policies. Meanwhile Bee Maps profits off your subscription and selling the map data to third parties.

Arodex 11mo ago

>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!

mbajkowski 11mo ago

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.

ww520 11mo ago

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.

jihadjihad 11mo ago
The point in TFA is that the roads captured by Tesla are likely correlated to income.
- JackFr 11mo ago
  And the users of this device are typically who?
  - relaxing 11mo ago
    The company that needs data everywhere, not just where teslas drive.
KaiserPro 11mo ago
They do, but for what ever reason they are not(or don't appear to be) using it to make machine readable maps. 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. )
xnx 10mo ago
Wouldn't it be obvious if Tesla vehicles were uploading gigabytes of video over wifi? This would cause many residential plans to go over their paltry quotas.

bikelang 11mo ago

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.

gavinray 11mo ago
> Yeah I’m definitely not going to pay a subscription for a dashcam so that some company can profit off my data. I'm playing Devil's Advocate here, but suppose this: 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."
- trashtensor 11mo ago
  Why shouldn't I get my cut, then? Why do they get to double dip? The point of the dash cam is that the data is ephemeral unless it's actually needed because something exceptional happened.
  - gavinray 11mo ago
    > Why shouldn't I get my cut, then? They do offer to pay you for it, which you'd know if you read the article.
    - hk__2 11mo ago
      OP obviously read the article; please don’t be aggressive.
    - UncleEntity 10mo ago
      So you pay $20/month to be able to earn some crypto-coins they generate out of thin air to be used for... 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...

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

clpwn 11mo ago

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!

KaiserPro 11mo ago

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 https://github.com/cvg/Hierarchical-Localization is the more advance and less user friendly version of colmap: https://github.com/colmap/colmap https://github.com/colmap/colmap

tcdent 10mo ago

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.

rels25 10mo ago
"you don't need the sophisticated hardware, anyway." 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.

rels25 10mo ago

API Playground is here https://beemaps.com/developers?tab=playground https://beemaps.com/developers?tab=playground you can also view some of the data generated by the Bee in there.

Krasnol 10mo ago

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"...

ygra 10mo ago
The map on the heatmap is definitely OSM without attribution. I can see a bunch of features I added. That doesn't make me respect them a lot. It's not that hard to use OSM correctly, at least in this context ...

gingermusketeer 10mo ago

KartaCam 2 [1] by grab seems to be a similar piece of hardware and has a closer relationship to OSM. The KartaView app [2] allows contributions via smartphones. [1] https://store.kartaview.org/collections/kartacam-2 https://store.kartaview.org/collections/kartacam-2 [2] https://kartaview.org/ https://kartaview.org/