Right now it’s limited to a web interface, and to New York City - the company has enough data to launch in several other areas in the U.S. You can also select the time of day, letting you rewind a few minutes or a few days - what was it like during that parade? Or after the game? Are there a lot of people there late at night? And so on. Where something like Google Maps or Waze may say that there’s an accident at this intersection, or construction causing traffic, Nexar’s map will show the locations of the orange cones to within a few feet, or how far into the lanes that fender-bender protrudes. And the nature of the data makes for extremely granular information.
Zooming in on a hexagonal map section, which the company has dubbed “nexagons,” polls the service to find everything the service knows about that area. But it helps to see what the product looks like in action before addressing that. But knowing where someone or some car was a year or two ago is one thing knowing where they were five minutes ago is another entirely.įortunately, from what I’ve heard, this issue was front of mind for the team from the start. Google has shown that properly handled, this kind of imagery can be useful and only minimally invasive. The team saw the community they’d enabled trading videos and sharing data derived by automatic analysis of their imagery, and, according to co-founder and CTO Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz, asked themselves: Why shouldn’t this data be available to the public as well?Īctually there are a few reasons - privacy chief among them.
Each node of this network of gadgets shares information with the other nodes - warning of traffic snarls, potholes, construction and so on. Nexar sells dash cams and offers an app that turns your phone into one temporarily, and the business has been doing well, with thousands of active users on the streets of major cities at any given time. It’s not quite as easy to picture how it works or why it’s useful. If you’re familiar with dash cams, and you’re familiar with Google’s Street View, then you can probably already picture what Live Map essentially is.
Nexar, maker of dashcam apps and cameras, aims to put fresh and specific data on your map with images from the street taken only minutes before. We all rely on maps to get where we’re going or investigate a neighborhood for potential brunch places, but the data we’re looking at is often old, vague or both.
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