Mapping startup Hivemapper will launch a new dashcam later this year, which its co-founder believes will accelerate efforts to wrest market share from Google.
The new Hivemapper Bee camera, revealed on Wednesday, is part of the company’s long-standing 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 corporate fleet owners, potentially supercharging its ability to capture fresher, more valuable mapping data.
The company has already made remarkable progress using data it has collected from previous models of the dashboard camera installed in the cars of thousands of delivery and delivery drivers. Hivemapper announced, in conjunction with the new camera, that its community of partners has mapped 8 million kilometers (5 million miles) of roads worldwide in 16 months — a milestone reached four times faster than it took Google to cross Street View, according to the company. Hivemapper has said it wants to cross 10 million kilometers by early 2024, and tells TechCrunch it expects to reach that point in April.
In general, the Bee is intended to be a more open or “passive” camera. It is weatherproof and more robust, to the point where drivers can mount it outside their car if they wish. It also no longer needs to connect to the Hivemapper smartphone app to upload material to the company’s servers. Bee also does more on-device processing of the data it captures. All of this is meant to make Bee more attractive to enterprise fleet customers, CEO Ariel Seidman tells TechCrunch in an interview.
The Bee is better than Hivemapper’s current 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 start today and Hivemapper plans to start shipping the camera in the third quarter of this year. A version with an LTE chip will cost $549, while a Wi-Fi-only version costs $449.
“Google can only refresh its maps once a year, once every two years,” because of the high-tech and high-cost nature of its vehicles, Gabe Nelson, Hivemapper’s chief operating officer, tells TechCrunch. He says Hivemapper’s crowdsourced community can “generate the kind of raw materials for mapping much, much faster.” Nelson says he expects that rate to accelerate as he works through an order list of more than 15,000 customers and begins shipping the Bee.
But Hivemapper isn’t just trying to map as many of the world’s roads as possible. “The holy grail is frequency,” Seidman says. “If you go to, say, Scottsdale, Arizona right now and pick a random spot. We see it probably 80 to 100 times a year. Google sees that maybe once every 14 to 18 months.”
This not only improves the mapping data that Hivemapper captures and sells to customers, but also opens up new business opportunities. Late last year, the company released Scout, a “site tracking tool” that allows customers to “mark” a location and receive images whenever a Hivemapper driver passes by. Customers can even place a “country” on locations to entice drivers to drive by more often.
Hivemapper’s customers cameras it should be better with Bee, too, according to the company. Hivemapper compensates contributors with a token called Honey, which was recently listed on the Coinbase exchange. The company says Bee will generate higher quality map data that is less likely to be rejected during submission. (Hivemapper lets people do quality assurance checks on map data and tagging in exchange for Honey tokens, and uses AI to do some of that, too.) And making the camera a little more autonomous — like automatic data upload—means contributors will be less likely to forget to do it themselves.
Of course, it’s not as easy to get people rewarded with tokens now 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 a Hivemapper camera 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 or Lyft or Amazon flex driver, and you already need this dashcam device because it gives you safety and other features, then this is a great device because it provides those capabilities and also rewards with that token,” says Nelson. “For many of them, they really enjoy the experience of building something that they can see for themselves.”
It’s a step back from the company’s 2022 talk about the badge building “loyalty” and “passion,” albeit an understandable one.
“I think people want to be fairly rewarded for the data they contribute, as they should be,” Nelson says. “But there has to be, especially in the case of a dashboard camera, there has to be another utility of value to the driver that they get above and beyond a badge.”
