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

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.

Comments

Re:Great, now people are paying to work

[Kjella]

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.

Re:I wish someone would do this for Havana

[rtb61]

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.