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A Man Spent $5,000 of His Own Money To Put Zimbabwe on Street View (cnet.com)

Posted by msmash on from the how-about-that dept.

Zimbabwe is too far for many people to visit, but 37-year-old Tawanda Kanhema grew up there before moving to the United States. Thanks to Kanhema, though, you'll soon be able to play virtual tourist, thanks to his work and the magic of Google Street View. From a report: Kanhema, who left the country to study journalism and documentary film-making at the University of California, Berkeley, spent two weeks back in Zimbabwe shooting the sights and sounds of the coolest places. Areas he covered include the capital's Harare's central business districts, malls, a virtual tour of Victoria Falls, Christmas Pass, the city of Mutare's main business strip as well as the Great Zimbabwe monument and the Eastern Highlands. He's uploaded over 500 miles of coverage, including Street View images uploaded during October and November. It's a lot to pack in, especially over a mere two weeks, but Kanhema got it done with a custom off-the-shelf kit of cameras consisting of the Insta360 Pro 2 and a GoPro Fusion. He particularly liked the Pro 2, which is Street View ready -- meaning he could publish footage to the platform right after shooting it.

CNET:So tell me more about you and why you decided to embark on such a project.
Kanhema: I grew up in Zimbabwe and went to school at the University of California, Berkeley where I studied journalism and documentary film-making. I currently work as a product manager in San Francisco, building news applications and internal tools for newsrooms. I have a background in journalism and documentary photography, so visual storytelling has always been close to my heart and I see a lot of opportunities for storytelling on the Street View platform.

73 comments

  1. Great, now people are paying to work by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    It's hard to compete when people are willing to work much cheaper than you.
    It's really hard to compete when people are willing to work for free just for the experience and a recommendation letter.

    Now people are paying their own money to work? I give up!

    1. Re:Great, now people are paying to work by SlaveToTheGrind · · Score: 5

      It's really hard to compete when people are willing to work for free just for the experience and a recommendation letter.

      Or, he spent his own time and money to do something that he thought was important, but nobody else with money thought was important enough to do or pay someone to do.

      Nobody owes you a job, and certainly nobody owes you a free 3D digitized map of anywhere on the face of the earth you desire. Stop whining on an anonymous internet discussion and go do something half as inspirational as this.

    2. Re:Great, now people are paying to work by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Nice try Boris we know it's you.
      It's called investing in your own ideas.

    3. Re:Great, now people are paying to work by Gavagai80 · · Score: 1

      Much like free software, where people invest their time and resources to make software that ends up being used by Google and IBM? Remember when that killed the software industry and it became impossible to get a job?

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    4. Re:Great, now people are paying to work by Kjella · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Or, he spent his own time and money to do something that he thought was important, but nobody else with money thought was important enough to do or pay someone to do. Nobody owes you a job, and certainly nobody owes you a free 3D digitized map of anywhere on the face of the earth you desire. Stop whining on an anonymous internet discussion and go do something half as inspirational as this.

      Well I do think it's relevant to discuss how much you're doing a public service and how much really just paying the piper.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    5. Re:Great, now people are paying to work by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      woosh

    6. Re:Great, now people are paying to work by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Nobody owes google a free 3D digitized map, they really should pay him for this. On the other hand, I would be happy to let you come and work for me, obviously I won't pay you any money, but then nobody owes you a job.

  2. Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I love looking at impoverished people living in grass huts!

    1. Re:Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      I love looking at impoverished people living in grass huts!

      The sad thing is that Zimbabwe was once a net exporter of food. Mugabe and his thugs really fucked it up.

    2. Re:Great! by arglebargle_xiv · · Score: 1

      They could still export their food, except that for some reason rats don't feature high on neighbouring nations diets.

    3. Re:Great! by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 1

      That was when it was called Rhodesia and was an apartheid state. Stay classy, Slashdot, pine wistfully for evil racist regimes.

      --
      Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
    4. Re: Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Those evil racists elevated hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, and fed an entire continent.

      But yeah, the people who (literally) legalized rape and plunged hundreds of millions of people into war and famine are the good guys...

    5. Re: Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Willfull ignorance.

    6. Re: Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That is racist!
      Intimating that black people can't run farms. They black people can't run a country equal to the peace and prosperity enjoyed by first World nations today.
      Get back in your home you scum ducking righty.
      Once they get rid of all of the colonist white people they will be fine.

    7. Re:Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Rhodesia never had apartheid written into law, and it had more black millionaires than anywhere else on the continent. Its inhabitants were far better off than they are today. Was it racist? Um, yeah, sure, but then again the white government never went around raping the natives as a matter of policy, and blacks who met property qualifications could vote coequally with whites. Compared to Mugabe, they were saints.

    8. Re:Great! by ArylAkamov · · Score: 1

      Rhodesia did nothing wrong, and they were all better off back then.

    9. Re: Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It was better off in every way before a bunch of communist backed nÃggers took over.

    10. Re: Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They were mostly exporting a killer crop - tobacco - racist crap from supporters of apartheid Loving white farmers

  3. Why oogle Maps? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    He could have used Mapillary.

  4. $5000 Zimbabwe dollars by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Is only about 35 cents so it wasn't so bad.

    1. Re:$5000 Zimbabwe dollars by goose-incarnated · · Score: 1

      Is only about 35 cents so it wasn't so bad.

      You're off by about three orders of magnitude (measured since the last time Zim had a currency).

      --
      I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
    2. Re:$5000 Zimbabwe dollars by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      That would've been funny about 7-8 years ago before Zimbabwe switched to US$.

      Or do you suppose they're using ZIM$ in California?

    3. Re:$5000 Zimbabwe dollars by Gavagai80 · · Score: 4, Informative

      Actually, Zimbabwe has their own pseudo currency again now. They're notes theoretically exchangeable for US$ but they haven't had enough US$ to exchange for quite a while so the value of the notes has been plummeting.

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  5. I wish someone would do this for Havana by ZorinLynx · · Score: 4, Interesting

    My mother grew up in Havana, and being able to street-view around Cuba's capital would be such an extremely nostalgic experience for her.

    1. Re:I wish someone would do this for Havana by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      My mother grew up in Havana, and being able to street-view around Cuba's capital would be such an extremely nostalgic experience for her.

      My parents lived in a neighborhood of Flint after they were first married. Being able to street-view around the old neighborhood was an... interesting experience for them, and much safer than actually wandering around the streets would be.

    2. Re:I wish someone would do this for Havana by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Then take a hint from the original article. If it's important to you, I'm sure you could find $5000.

      And if you can't find the $5000 then I guess it wasn't really that important after all.

    3. Re:I wish someone would do this for Havana by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I lived in Flint for a short period of time. I tell other people not to go there. It's an armpit.

    4. Re:I wish someone would do this for Havana by Gavagai80 · · Score: 0

      $5000 doesn't help as much when you have to navigate the maze of US rules against doing things in Cuba.

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    5. Re: I wish someone would do this for Havana by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It all depends on whether or not it is a good cause. Obviously some causes are good by definition. Other causes abysmal by definition

    6. Re:I wish someone would do this for Havana by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well then man up and front the money. Otherwise shut the fuck up.

    7. Re:I wish someone would do this for Havana by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      My mother grew up in Havana, and being able to street-view around Cuba's capital would be such an extremely nostalgic experience for her.

      As soon as you shoot the first picture you'd been thrown to jail for spying on the benevolent and legitimate government of Cuba.

    8. Re:I wish someone would do this for Havana by rmdingler · · Score: 1

      Spent at least $5000 on a forgettable Christmas once upon a twice.

      Not to be sacrilegious..... $5K to improve world mapping and act as an ointment to, er, local frailties is A-okay wtih me.

      --
      Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

      Ernest Hemingway

    9. Re:I wish someone would do this for Havana by rtb61 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You are confused between $5,000 at a go and $5,000 total. Any market is made up of market segments. You do not have to pay for the entire market, just your segment of the market. It would likely be very good for a lot of cities and countries to gather their own street view data and offer it to search companies to create competition for Google. Distributed data collection would be a very effective way to compete against goggle maps and it would be very much in countries interests to create competition for Google, who blatantly cheats on taxes, demands all other taxpayers pay their way, corrupt politics through biases forced onto people attempting to use Google products and of course charge based upon the basis of a lack of competition. When countries gather their own data, their own street view images, they can offer to as many companies as are willing to make it available on the internet.

      Goggles competitors will have not ignored this and countries feeling the abuse of google in terms of tax cheating, distortion of democracy and uncompetitive pricing can effectively force real competition on Google.

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      Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
    10. Re:I wish someone would do this for Havana by squiggleslash · · Score: 1

      Whoever owns Slashdot, could we have a (-1, Jerk) response? Also appropriate for the "Oh, so TFA says someone built a 6502 out of Lego bricks? What's the point in that, it'd be too slow to run Excel!" type comments.

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
  6. Too far from where? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    > Zimbabwe is too far for many people to visit

    More than 100 million people live in countries next to Zimbabwe.
    If you want to say "too far from US for many US citizens to visit", then spell it out.

    1. Re:Too far from where? by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 1

      Current population of the planet minus 100 million people still counts as "many people".

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      #DeleteFacebook
    2. Re:Too far from where? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > Zimbabwe is too far for many people to visit

      More than 100 million people live in countries next to Zimbabwe.
      If you want to say "too far from US for many US citizens to visit", then spell it out.

      Not sure what your point is. (Or even what the point of the original comment was.) Every day there are multiple flights to South Africa. And once there it's quite easy to fly or drive to Zimbabwe. It's definitely not too far for some, many, or even all people to get to. Americans or otherwise. If they want to go.

      There are a lot of places that are much closer that I will never go to. It's certainly not a matter of how far away it is.

      And FWIW, I'm an American, and I've been to Zimbabwe.

    3. Re:Too far from where? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > Zimbabwe is too far for many people to visit

      More than 100 million people live in countries next to Zimbabwe.
      If you want to say "too far from US for many US citizens to visit", then spell it out.

      These people don't think that way. This is probably some dipshit from New York or Los Angeles who thinks that their one city is the entire world. They probably didn't even realize someone from 100 miles away would read it. They've probably never been that far from home.

    4. Re: Too far from where? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Do those 100 million people matter? It's not like they're Europeans, you know.

    5. Re:Too far from where? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not sure what your point is. (Or even what the point of the original comment was.)

      Original AC here.

      My point was that claiming a country is "too far" without a reference point is stupid, by design.
      The claim "far" would make sense in most national news outlets. If the article would have appeared on BBC, then, sure, Zimbabwe is far from London. Chinese or Russian sites would refer to Bejing or Moscow as "default location", no problem. But Slashdot is a global website and has no "home" or "here".

    6. Re:Too far from where? by iNaya · · Score: 1
      Wow genius. The United States is too far for many people to visit.

      The statement is pointless, it applies to every country on earth.

      --
      The Unicode standard is over 20 years old. Why does Slashdot not support it?
    7. Re:Too far from where? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      But "and doesn't have street view maps" does not.

      Try to stay actually on topic.

  7. If you are good at something... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ...never do it for free.

    1. Re: If you are good at something... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Come again?

  8. All I can say is by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 1

    Good for him! Seriously.

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    #DeleteChrome
  9. $5000 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    He Dindu Nuffin.

  10. Victoria Falls... by wolfheart111 · · Score: 2

    If for anything else but these falls. Nobody has hardly seen them, to the extent where people are thinking the falls are a mandela effect... Good to this beautiful country on the map. :)

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    [($)]
    1. Re:Victoria Falls... by BoogieChile · · Score: 1

      You know, there's a bungee jump, cafe and gift shop on the Victoria Falls Bridge these days...

  11. Excellent by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    One more s*ithole country I can see without visiting.

  12. Look! Someone dropped a billion dollars! by thesjaakspoiler · · Score: 1

    Just 999 more billion dollar notes to actually buy an apple. https://www.amazon.com/Zimbabw...

  13. Would have been better off giving the data by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Would have been better off giving the data to the OpenStreetMaps project instead of giving it away to Google to claim copyright over it.

    1. Re: Would have been better off giving the data by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Butthurt much? Nobody cares about loser open source crap, shitboi.

  14. Volunteer Mapping by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If you are volunteering to do this an open platform like Mapillary or OpenStreetCam. Unless Google are paying you don't bother contributing to Google Street View.

    1. Re:Volunteer Mapping by Aristos+Mazer · · Score: 1

      If you want people to actually see it, you need to upload it to the site that people are going to visit. The vast majority of the world isn't going to even know that alternative sites exist, much less check them while they're navigating around. Unless Google is pulling from those databases whenever it doesn't have images of its own, the data needs to be put into Google. You could upload it to multiple sites, but Google needs to be in the mix for it to be useful to most people.

    2. Re:Volunteer Mapping by Herve5 · · Score: 1

      This does not prevent, in any way, to upload the same images on Openstreetmap.
      Addtionally, this very thread would have been enormously different, and quite more important that the curent "he went on holidays and, basically, took pics in an original way (helping Google)"...

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      Herve S.
    3. Re:Volunteer Mapping by Aristos+Mazer · · Score: 1

      As I said in my final sentence earlier: "You could upload it to multiple sites..."

  15. U.S Rules? by SuperKendall · · Score: 2

    $5000 doesn't help as much when you have to navigate the maze of US rules against doing things in Cuba.

    There are no "U.S. rules" that apply in Cuba. You could take any cruise ship there, get off, and start recording.

    Please do let us know how you like the inside of a Cuban jail...

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
  16. Except OSM is *vastly* superior. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It has *way* more details than Google, Apple and Here *combined*.

    Seriously, once you start using it, you stil know that Google has nice 3D satellite views and streetview, but ... it just feels like going back to the stone age. There's barely anything there on Google Maps! It feels like going back to Windows when you became used to using all the features of a proper window manager and package manager and simple commented text file configuration system. You feel like a bling cripple.

  17. Is he a kaffer? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0



    M on M tot M tot REUNION `REUNION `REUNION `EASIER .
    M . M tot M M on M us are M us are M us are M tot M `
    M `M tot M . M . M us are M us are M us are M tot M `
    IDS tot M tot M `DURST on DURST on DURST on EASIER .
    M `M on REUNION `M us are M us are M us are M . M on
    M . M . M tot M `M us are M us are M us are M on M .
    M on M `M tot M `M us are M us are REUNION `M tot M `

     is the african word for

    Q tot Q `LBS . ABACK on ABACK . BEETLER `BINGEN .
    UH on Q . Q . Q tot Q `Q tot Q `Q us are Q tot Q `
    Q Q . Q . Q . Q us are Q us are Q us are Q tot Q `
    Q `Q `Q . Q . Q `FOLL `Q `FOLL `ABACK on BINGEN .
    Q . Q Q . Q . Q tot Q `Q tot Q `Q us are Q . Q on
    Q on UH . Q . Q tot Q `Q tot Q `Q us are Q on Q .
    Q tot Q `LBS . ABACK on ABACK . BEETLER `Q tot Q `

  18. stiff jerky flat robot hand face-palm by epine · · Score: 1

    Zimbabwe is too far for many people to visit ...

    You see, the earth really is flat (and disc-like), and all the early settlements started out at the rim—strictly established in alphabetic order—and gradually we progressed toward the proximal center.

    So if even Zimbabwe is still too far away for most people to visit, then we really are screwed, and Discworld is, indeed—as legend records—Too Big to Not Fail.

  19. WTF is a... by barakn · · Score: 1

    "custom off-the-shelf kit"

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    "I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
  20. Charity for Google by Actually,+I+do+RTFA · · Score: 1

    I too agree, Google cannot be expected to afford building its own database. It needs to rely on individuals crowdsourcing data. After all, they're a small mom and pop operation. I especially like how the people doing the work don't even get expenses offset, let alone a share of the cash Google makes off their work.

    Oh, and I totally agree with your sig. Fuck Chrome and the guys who make it. #DeleteChrome.

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    Your ad here. Ask me how!
  21. Yay. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Some negro achieved a minor accomplishment, so now we all have to stand up and cheer. Yay.

  22. Hardly spending, more investing. by RockDoctor · · Score: 1
    • Student studying journalism and documentary making.
    • Invests in some decent quality camera gear.
    • Goes home for a working holiday. Enjoys holiday, gets a lot of footage.
    • Edits it into a lot of useful stuff demonstrating a swathe of skill useful in documentary making.
    • Writes a story about how he did this using skills from the journalism leg of his course.
    • And now - he's got a lot of publicity for himself as a recently minted journalist and documentary maker.

    I'd call that pretty effective self-promotion. A nice project too, I'll grant. But he's done a good job of turning this opportunity into a good CV for helping him in his job hunt. $5000 invested, and if it pays off in the next several years and he's kept the receipts, he should be able to put it against tax.

    --
    Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"