Making money while driving to the office

The Internet has always been full of schemes for making money while doing nothing. In its earlier iteration, people were paid to browse, click on links or distribute (spam) email.

Then we got into crowdsourcing and performing very simple tasks for pennies. Amazon Mechanical Turk is a prime example of that. Or image labeling. These are tasks which would be difficult to implement in code but are trivial to solve for humans. Without thousands of people from around the world, where $6/hour is a lot of money, none of the image recognition systems and self-driving cars could ever become reality.

Now we are entering the next phase of this kind of crowdsourcing thanks to the advancement of Web3 technologies. (If you’d like, you can check out what our researchers are saying about the direction of Web3.)

Today's example is brought to you by Hivemapper. Its promise is that you can earn money while you are driving. Now, it’s not like Uber or Lyft where you have to drive someone around or deliver food. No, just for driving around you can get paid.

How are you going to make money with this? You mount a company-provided camera in your car and start driving. You can drive to the office, go shopping or take a vacation trip. The camera will send all the images to the hive and you will get paid.

There is quite a complicated scheme for how the value of your work is calculated, but in theory, you should be receiving Hivemapper tokens called HONEY (I am not making this up) which is the cryptocurrency of the Hivemapper Network.

Why is this happening? Does it make sense? Why should anyone care?

First, the mapping business is big business. Only the biggest companies (Google, Apple, etc...) can afford to spend money mapping the whole world and, especially, keep it up to date. Being able to see the most recent picture of a place is valuable. Governments, companies and individuals need it. The ability to check the surroundings is embedded in so many devices, such as cars or phones.

Hivemapper decided to outsource the actual work to the whole planet and break the oligopoly of Big Tech.

Did that ever work before? Yes, it did. Thousands of software developers decided that they could build a better operating system than MS Windows and created Linux.

Is this a sure thing? Far from it. While I was writing this post, the company managed to map 163 km. It’s not much, but they have to start somewhere.

For you to begin to earn HONEY, you have to buy their camera for $549 or $649. I have no idea how long you will have to drive to get your initial investment back. It will also depend on the route you drive. Will it be of interest to anyone to buy an image for the particular location? Also, at this moment you can only hope that one day you will be able to turn HONEY into cash.

It is hard to say if this particular idea will work. But what this new technology allows is for you to do transparent microtransactions. It allows anyone to participate directly in frictionless business activity. If you are looking for ideas for a new startup, this is something to consider. The Web3 recurrent patterns are being created as we speak.