[HN Gopher] Mapping Amazing: Bee Maps
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Mapping Amazing: Bee Maps
Author : altilunium
Score : 50 points
Date : 2025-11-30 08:50 UTC (6 days ago)
(HTM) web link (maphappenings.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (maphappenings.com)
| NoNotTheDuo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Beemaps has what VCs crave. It's got *AI*.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| You know, the AI pet rock guy made a million dollars.
| fyrecean wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The point in TFA is that the roads captured by Tesla are likely
| correlated to income.
| JackFr wrote:
| And the users of this device are typically who?
| relaxing wrote:
| The company that needs data everywhere, not just where
| teslas drive.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| 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. )
| bikelang wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| OP obviously read the article; please don't be
| aggressive.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| 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...
| gavinray wrote:
| To phrase my point another way, an analogy might be:
|
| Would you shout away a man who dug through your trash to
| pull out things he could sell?
|
| You've already binned the trash. At that point, nothing
| that happens to it matters to you.
|
| Either:
|
| A) You lose nothing, and nobody gains something
|
| B) You lose nothing, and somebody gains something
|
| Picking A) is, from a philosophical viewpoint,
| essentially malice for the sake of it.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| Like I said, you do you.
|
| All I really have an issue with is the claim you get
| compensated for the time and energy you, essentially,
| donate to the company. If that's what you want to do with
| your time then by all means...
|
| It just seems like a weird business model to me, they
| sell a pimped-out dash cam (fair enough) and pay some
| tokens (or rely on your philosophical bent) so you're
| willing to turn over all your data so they can repackage
| and sell it. To give credit where credit is due, they
| seem to be completely transparent with this and if the
| people who participate don't care then why should I?
| kingforaday wrote:
| If you think about it, they should give the hardware away as a
| lease to Uber, lyft, taxi drivers and pay them per mile. They
| are likely going to go the most diverse routes than say you or
| I that drive to work, home, the grocery store, and the park
| every now and then.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Yeah it's a huge waste to put that into one company's pocket
| instead of sharing it with OSM.
|
| That reminds me, if anyone is in touch with the CoMaps folks...
| A feature to sync points and routes from my phone to my
| computer would be nifty. I don't record routes enough, and I
| often map places while I'm out without Wi-Fi.
| rels25 wrote:
| Some of it will go to improve OSM e.g. road widths, etc.
| Krasnol wrote:
| I've been giving street data to Mapillary before they've been
| chewed up by Meta.
|
| Now I go for Panoramax...with my phone stuck to the front
| window of my car or bike.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panoramax
| clpwn wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 is the more
| advance and less user friendly version of colmap:
| https://github.com/colmap/colmap
| tcdent wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| API Playground is here
|
| https://beemaps.com/developers?tab=playground
|
| you can also view some of the data generated by the Bee in there.
| Krasnol wrote:
| 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"...
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(page generated 2025-12-06 23:00 UTC)