A Man Spent $5,000 of His Own Money To Put Zimbabwe on Street View

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.

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, 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:

[Gavagai80]

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?

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.

Re:

[arglebargle_xiv]

They could still export their food [cnn.com], except that for some reason rats don't feature high on neighbouring nations diets.

Re:

[DNS-and-BIND]

That was when it was called Rhodesia and was an apartheid state. Stay classy, Slashdot, pine wistfully for evil racist regimes.

Re: Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Look! Someone dropped a billion dollars!

[thesjaakspoiler]

Just 999 more billion dollar notes to actually buy an apple. https://www.amazon.com/Zimbabw... [amazon.com]

Re:

[goose-incarnated]

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).

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

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.

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:

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

My parents lived in a neighborhood of Flint after they were first married. Being able to street-view around the old neighborhood was an... interesting experience for them, and much safer than actually wandering around the streets would be.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Then take a hint from the original article. If it's important to you, I'm sure you could find $5000.

And if you can't find the $5000 then I guess it wasn't really that important after all.

Re:

[Gavagai80]

$5000 doesn't help as much when you have to navigate the maze of US rules against doing things in Cuba.

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.

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...

Re:

[rmdingler]

Spent at least $5000 on a forgettable Christmas once upon a twice.

Not to be sacrilegious..... $5K to improve world mapping and act as an ointment to, er, local frailties is A-okay wtih me.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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:

[DontBeAMoran]

Current population of the planet minus 100 million people still counts as "many people".

Re:

[iNaya]

Wow genius. The United States is too far for many people to visit.

The statement is pointless, it applies to every country on earth.

All I can say is

[93 Escort Wagon]

Good for him! Seriously.

Charity for Google

[Actually, I do RTFA]

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.

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:

[BoogieChile]

You know, there's a bungee jump, cafe and gift shop on the Victoria Falls Bridge these days...

Re:

[Aristos Mazer]

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.

Re:

[Herve5]

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)"...

Re:

[Aristos Mazer]

As I said in my final sentence earlier: "You could upload it to multiple sites..."

stiff jerky flat robot hand face-palm

[epine]

Zimbabwe is too far for many people to visit ...

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.

WTF is a...

[barakn]

"custom off-the-shelf kit"

Hardly spending, more investing.

[RockDoctor]

• Student studying journalism and documentary making.
• Invests in some decent quality camera gear.
• Goes home for a working holiday. Enjoys holiday, gets a lot of footage.
• Edits it into a lot of useful stuff demonstrating a swathe of skill useful in documentary making.
• Writes a story about how he did this using skills from the journalism leg of his course.
• And now - he's got a lot of publicity for himself as a recently minted journalist and documentary maker.

I'd call that pretty effective self-promotion. A nice p