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

[SlaveToTheGrind]

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.

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I wish someone would do this for Havana

[ZorinLynx]

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.

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.

Too far from where?

[Anonymous Coward]

> 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.

Re:$5000 Zimbabwe dollars

[Gavagai80]

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.

Victoria Falls...

[wolfheart111]

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. :)

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.

U.S Rules?

[SuperKendall]

$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...