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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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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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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Good for him! Seriously.
#DeleteChrome
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. :)
[($)]
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
Just 999 more billion dollar notes to actually buy an apple. https://www.amazon.com/Zimbabw...
$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
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.
They could still export their food, except that for some reason rats don't feature high on neighbouring nations diets.
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)"...
Herve S.
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!
As I said in my final sentence earlier: "You could upload it to multiple sites..."
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...
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.
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.
"custom off-the-shelf kit"
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
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.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Rhodesia did nothing wrong, and they were all better off back then.
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"