Mapping Amazing: Bee Maps
24 comments
·November 30, 2025bikelang
rels25
Some of it will go to improve OSM e.g. road widths, etc.
kingforaday
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
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.
gavinray
> Yeah I’m definitely not going to pay a subscription for a dashcam so that some company can profit off my data.
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
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
> Why shouldn't I get my cut, then?
tcdent
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.
NoNotTheDuo
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.
fyrecean
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.
mcrk
Beemaps has what VCs crave. It's got *AI*.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF
You know, the AI pet rock guy made a million dollars.
KaiserPro
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
clpwn
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!
mbajkowski
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
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.
KaiserPro
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. )
jihadjihad
The point in TFA is that the roads captured by Tesla are likely correlated to income.
Arodex
>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!
null
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.