In my experience street level imagery is extremely helpful to add business names and other points of interest!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_from_motion
Mapillary's open contribution (Structure from Motion pipeline):
“We need a map of Kansas City using devices we provide you. We pay nothing up front, nothing at completion, and no residuals for profits we earn from your imagery. You may not keep the equipment we provide. You are responsible for all expenses.”
Who on earth would accept that Taskrabbit?
I.e. organisations that think it’ll be a useful marketing effort, or it’ll help their customers.
Lol. That guy was something else.
If you work in SF and spend $5000 on a passion project flying to Zimbabwe, you will have no problem affording gas.
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)
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.
This guy just wanted to record his home country and street view was a good way to fuse it with map data, and publish it widely.
Google didn't ask him to do this, so why would they pay him? He wanted the photos published, Google has a place to do that.
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.
> So this guy will get paid
Who pays for that?
* I'm South African.
So consider OpenStreetMaps (they also have a kind of streetview project) or any other kind of FREE project in witch you invest money and after co-own the data.
Obviously hearing the answer is “get a camera loaned for free” was a disappointment.
It's varies a bit depending if you're capturing via car, bicycle, foot or any other mode of transport, then again based on your budget and how much effort you want to put into your setup.
> I recently spent 6 weeks driving around virtually the whole country
I think you should have made it clearer that your initial statement was hyperbole, because if taken literally, how were you driving for 6 weeks?
I drove around for 6 weeks about 5 months ago, which I consider recently.
Something you need to understand about African countries is that things change fast. Much, much faster than you con comprehend if you've never spent significant time there, because our First-World minds expect things to continue on an even keel.
My statement is very much NOT hyperbole. Multiple friends who have lived their entire lives in Zim currently can't get a drop.