Hivemapper Mapped 1 Million Unique Kilometers

Today, thanks to the work of map contributors all over the world, Hivemapper eclipsed 1,000,000 KM of unique street-level imagery! Over only the last 3 months, the Hivemapper community has done what took Google Street View 5x longer to do. That is simply incredible. See the last paragraph to learn how we calculated the 5x factor.

We're also happy to announce that, as of March 8th, all pre-orders have been fulfilled (ahead of schedule!), and the core team has shipped significant updates to both the Hivmeapper Dashcam firmware and the Hivemapper App, which have collectively enhanced the contributor experience and made mapping far easier than ever before. Kudos to the core devs that made this possible.

Hivemapper contributors have been growing the Hivemapper Map exponentially, faster than we expected. In addition to mapping 1M unique road km 5x faster than Google Street View, our contributors have also mapped unique places where Google Street View does not have any coverage. This is one of the defining features of an open, permissionless map; collectively, we’re able to build a richer, more robust map, faster and more detailed than any centralized mapping service ever could. This means that underserved areas will be seen, and neglected regions can bring their roads online permissionslessly. As more map contributors join the Hivemapper Network, these underserved and hard- or yet-to-be-mapped regions will serve as a major differentiator to the status quo. 

As we celebrate our 1M unique road km mapped milestone, we’re setting our sights on the next milestone: 10M unique road km mapped. Individual contributors helped  grow the map to 1M unique road km in just 3 months. We believe the next 10M km will be unlocked with fleets. 

We will soon launch Hivemapper Fleets, a way to create and manage fleets. After you create a fleet on Hivemapper, you can add fleet managers and drivers and set how you’d like to split HONEY tokens between yourself and members. We released and announced Hivemapper Fleets Beta at the end of September and have been iterating on it since then. 

Fleets are optimal for providing what Hivemapper’s decentralized global map needs: quality, coverage, and freshness.

While mapping new places is important, Hivemapper has the potential to be the “freshest” map in the world.  Maps with the  highest refresh rate are the most valuable. In service of this objective, the Hivemapper Foundation introduced Map Improvement Proposal 2 (MIP-2), which improves aspects of the HONEY reward program to incentivize better coverage and freshness in high-demand regions and countries. 

Billions of people around the world depend on maps each day. Maps are an essential part of the world’s technology infrastructure and are used by companies across industries like logistics, insurance, real estate, utilities, and government. Hivemapper Inc. estimates the market for maps is $300B when taking into account mapping APIs, GIS, geo analytics, and data collection services.

Businesses are requesting more detailed and up-to-date maps. The GIFs below illustrate how the Hivemapper Map is scaling to provide coverage and freshness in the United States, Europe, and South Korea. This is just a start. Hivemapper’s mission is to build a continuously updating global map of our world. 

Over the past month, Hivemapper contributors added 660,000 km of unique coverage. That statistic is published daily in real time on our Explorer page. Google launched Street View in May 2007 (link) and by June 2012, they had mapped 8 million kilometers of roads. (link) Averaged over 60 months, that is 133k kilometers per month, or 5x slower. This comparison is very conservative because it compares Google's average over five years with Hivemapper's current monthly run rate. The reason this is very conservative is that Google was most likely adding coverage more slowly than this 5-year average at the beginning, and Hivemapper's growth rate is currently accelerating as more of the dashcams we've already sold come online. However, this is probably the safest number to use, based only on Google's public statements.