How To Turn Your Daily Drive Into Profit With Hivemapper

Map­ping is big busi­ness.  From 2016–2018, Uber paid Google $58 mil­lion for the use of Google’s maps.  That’s $53,00 per DAY.  Map­ping, of course is a data flow tech­nol­o­gy, and where data flows, mon­ey goes.  You and I, as “nor­mal peo­ple” are just begin­ning to be able to tap into these per­va­sive data flows around us.  From our per­son­al data to the data we can gen­er­ate just by inter­act­ing with the world around us, we are sur­round­ed by a flood of data. 

Obvi­ous­ly, map­ping is ripe for a blockchain + meat­space solu­tion.  In Decem­ber of 2021, I sat down with Ariel Sied­man at Hivemapper for a walk through what they’re doing to allow you to tap into one of the many large data flows swirling around us every day 

Before we talk about how you can start to tap into the data flow of your map­ping capa­bil­i­ties (or just go straight there if you’re impa­tient), let’s talk about who might buy map­ping data.

One thing that’s like­ly is that YOU don’t.  You just open up your phone, choose your favorite map­ping app, and get where you’re going.  For the most part, you don’t care what the route looks like, you just want the fastest route.

Unless, of course, you’re a real estate devel­op­er.  In that case, you want to know every­thing you can about a piece of land before you put seri­ous mon­ey into it.  Real estate devel­op­ers pore over maps; they’re obsessed with them.  They look at prop­er­ties from every angle.  “Can we move this wall here?”  “How much space do we have to the prop­er­ty line?”  “How high is this?”  “Where are the exte­ri­or doors?” and a long list of oth­er ques­tions that they’ll pay to have answered.

Real estate devel­op­ers aren’t the only ones inter­est­ing in map­ping data.  Uber wants it, Lyft wants it, urban plan­ners want it, and they’re all will­ing to pay for fresh, accu­rate data.

That’s where you, and Hivemap­per, come in.  Hivemap­per is one of a small group of com­pa­nies hus­tling to share the wealth of data you have the poten­tial to cre­ate, just by dri­ving around.

In broad strokes:  You buy a dash­cam for your car, con­nect it to your phone, and dri­ve around.  As you map “tiles”, or small sec­tions of the earth (8′ x 8′ as exam­ple), you get paid for pro­vid­ing fresh map­ping coverage. 

Hivemap­per will start to val­ue some tiles as high­er than oth­ers; dri­ving down Main St for the 500th time that day is less valu­able than dri­ving down that one alley that no one has dri­ven down for months.

Hivemap­per will also start to give you options for alter­nate routes as you dri­ve, allow­ing you to scoop up the most valu­able tiles that are close to where you’re going.  I see that being a pret­ty fun game, and pos­si­bly an excel­lent addi­tion­al rev­enue source for Uber, Lyft, and oth­er pro­fes­sion­al drivers. 

The solu­tion is still in its infan­cy.  For now, it’s only avail­able in cer­tain mar­kets, and you have to move the data from the dash­cam to the cloud via an SD card.  Yep, no wire­less automa­tion yet, but that’s coming.

Even­tu­al­ly, the dash­cam will move data to the cloud via your phone, and your phone will upload it via WiFi.  Of course, I’m not going to wait for “even­tu­al­ly.”  🙂

I went ahead and bought the only cur­rent­ly approved dash­cam for Hivermap­per, even though San Diego isn’t an “avail­able” mar­ket yet.  Once I’ve got it mount­ed, I’ll be fir­ing it up and report­ing back on this.

I’m expect­ing (since this is such a young project) the usu­al fric­tion that comes from try­ing new things.  If YOU have a Hivemap­per and any expe­ri­ence with ’em, please let me know in the com­ments.  I’m excit­ed to be map­ping our world together!

If you want to buy a dash­cam and sup­port my work, use code DEPINSTATE in the Hivemap­per store to knock 5% off your order.