Back in 2014, a Moroccan guy did something similar, created a Street view clone for a 10 cities in Morocco huge challenge for one person, with limited resources: http://carte.ma/
Spending $5k to put Zimbabwe on Street View
31–40 of 46 posts
Re: Spending $5k to put Zimbabwe on Street View
#32"Google Trusted Photogapher" here.
https://www.google.com/streetview/hire/
Verification: https://goo.gl/maps/Nx9JwEB731m
We can now add to Streetview instead of just adding to Google Maps. I.e. we can create a blue line instead of just blue dots.
And a lot of us are doing it, by request, and paid. And no, Google never paid us anything, we had to sell by ourselves and set our own prices.
So this guy will get paid, this is great PR.
Re: Spending $5k to put Zimbabwe on Street View
#33I wonder how they got gas or diesel... there is essentially none in Zimbabwe right now. Even cooking oil is getting hard to come by as everyone is running it as diesel in older mechanical engines (which burn it fine)
There is gas and diesel - it is just expensive for everyday folk relative to how much money they can realistically make. If you work in SF and spend $5000 on a passion project flying to Zimbabwe, you will have no problem affording gas.
No it wouldn't help. There simply isn't enough out there & quite frankly people would outpay "$5k on a passion project" for a stable supply.
Re: Spending $5k to put Zimbabwe on Street View
#34While this is a cool project and congrats to the guy, seriously, Google can't even cover the expenses for him and other people who do this kind of thing? How many people do this kind of thing, and how much would it cost Google to cover them all? How much would it cost them to cover a salary for them too, even a basic one? Do we have any way of trying to make a reasonable guess at that? Maybe Tawanda was aware of this…
The same thing could be said about wikipedia btw: In 2018 they received 104 million dollars (of which 2.3 went to pay for the servers), so if they wanted, they could actually get 100 million worth of content.
This is what really annoys me about Wikipedia - it begs for money like it's going out of business but in reality the money it gets, aside from the tiny amount that actually runs everything is basically frittered in what is little more than fraud frankly.
Re: Spending $5k to put Zimbabwe on Street View
#35I wonder how they got gas or diesel... there is essentially none in Zimbabwe right now. Even cooking oil is getting hard to come by as everyone is running it as diesel in older mechanical engines (which burn it fine)
Have you been to Zimbabwe? Drop a pin literally anywhere on Zimbabwe on Google maps to enter street view. The streets are full of cars and every parking space is taken.
I recently spent 6 weeks driving around virtually the whole country, yes.
In the last ~month their economy has collapsed. Their currency is worthless, and there is no gas or diesel in the country. I have plenty of friends in the country and get regular updates.
Re: Spending $5k to put Zimbabwe on Street View
#36I wonder how they got gas or diesel... there is essentially none in Zimbabwe right now. Even cooking oil is getting hard to come by as everyone is running it as diesel in older mechanical engines (which burn it fine)
There is gas and diesel - it is just expensive for everyday folk relative to how much money they can realistically make. If you work in SF and spend $5000 on a passion project flying to Zimbabwe, you will have no problem affording gas.
> There is gas and diesel - it is just expensive for everyday folk relative to how much money they can realistically make
Do you have first hand experience from the last ~month? (since everything has collapsed again)
Friends living there who are very, very well off can not physically get their hands on a single liter of gas or diesel.
I recently spent 6 weeks driving around virtually all of Zimbabwe, I have a pretty good idea how the country works (or at least, before the most recent collapse)
Re: Spending $5k to put Zimbabwe on Street View
#37I was impatient for Street View to reach my country so I made my own back in 2014. I took photospheres of my university campus and made a website for it using an embedded Street View container. I did it as a personal project. The university ended up discounting a reasonable chunk of my tuition as a recognition and for my effort! First I was taking individual photos on my DSLR and stiching them manually then I continued the bulk using a spare Android phone which made everything (slightly) easier (auto stiching, geo-tagged...) but I still had to stand at each point and take 18+ photos for each photosphere. You can check it on http://discoveruob.com
Re: Spending $5k to put Zimbabwe on Street View
#38"Google Trusted Photogapher" here. https://www.google.com/streetview/hire/ Verification: https://goo.gl/maps/Nx9JwEB731m We can now add to Streetview instead of just adding to Google Maps. I.e. we can create a blue line instead of just blue dots. And a lot of us are doing it, by request, and paid. And no, Google never paid us anything, we had to sell by ourselves and set our own prices. So this guy will get paid, thi…
> Google never paid us anything
> So this guy will get paid
Who pays for that?
Re: Spending $5k to put Zimbabwe on Street View
#39I was impatient for Street View to reach my country so I made my own back in 2014. I took photospheres of my university campus and made a website for it using an embedded Street View container. I did it as a personal project. The university ended up discounting a reasonable chunk of my tuition as a recognition and for my effort! First I was taking individual photos on my DSLR and stiching them manually then I continu…
I really enjoyed clicking around and virtually touring the campus - especially knowing how much work it must have been!
What a great project, glad the university recognized your effort.
Re: Spending $5k to put Zimbabwe on Street View
#40While this is a cool project and congrats to the guy, seriously, Google can't even cover the expenses for him and other people who do this kind of thing? How many people do this kind of thing, and how much would it cost Google to cover them all? How much would it cost them to cover a salary for them too, even a basic one? Do we have any way of trying to make a reasonable guess at that? Maybe Tawanda was aware of this…
The same thing could be said about wikipedia btw: In 2018 they received 104 million dollars (of which 2.3 went to pay for the servers), so if they wanted, they could actually get 100 million worth of content.
The difference that means I have less problems providing "free" work to Wikipedia is the open license that means others can reuse it freely. I hope Tawanda will upload all his images to one of the two open sites mentioned in this discussion as well.