Mapillary

Mapillary is a service for open-source sharing of crowdsourced geotagged photos, including 360° photos and street-level imagery similar to Google Street View. It is developed by remote company Mapillary AB, based in Malmö, Sweden. Mapillary was launched in 2013¹ and acquired by Meta Platforms, Inc. in 2020.

Mapillary is a service for open-source sharing of crowdsourced geotagged photos, including 360° photos and street-level imagery similar to Google Street View. It is developed by remote company Mapillary AB, based in Malmö, Sweden. Mapillary was launched in 2013 and acquired by Meta Platforms, Inc. in 2020. ==History== Mapillary co-founders were Jan Erik Solem, Johan Gyllenspetz, Peter Neubauer and Yubin Kuang. According to Solem, Mapillary was founded to allow crowdsourcing of street-level imagery for use with computer vision. The project started in September 2013, with an iPhone app released in November 2013, followed by an Android app released in January 2014. Mapillary received $1.5 million in seed capital funding from a group of investors, led by Sequoia Capital in January 2015. In March 2016, it raised $8M additional funding (Atomico, Sequoia, LDV Capital, and PlayFair) for expanded operations, including more computer vision talent and a San Francisco office. In spring 2018, the company received $15M investment led by BMW i Ventures for a total estimated funding of $25M. In September 2018, Mapillary announced a "collaboration" with Amazon to use the Rekognition visual data analysis platform to extract text from Mapillary's huge database of 350 million images. As large cities struggle to manage current street sign inventories, the first major project is identifying parking signs and extracting sign text for one large U.S. city, which will use the data to build a parking app to help save drivers time when searching for parking. In October 2018, the company made CNBC's annual list of top 100 start-ups to watch. In November 2018, Mapillary released a software development kit (SDK) allowing interested third-party software developers to integrate Mapillary image-capture functionality in their apps, opening the way for additional input channels. In June 2020, Facebook acquired Mapillary for an undisclosed amount. After the acquisition, commercial use of Mapillary was made available free of charge. Due to Mapillary being widely used for contributing to OpenStreetMap and fears that Facebook might shut the service down, a tool was subsequently created for synchronizing data between Mapillary and KartaView (formerly OpenStreetCam). By November 14, over 55TiB or 30 million images had been transferred to KartaView. ==Features== Mapillary offers different capturing modes including walking, riding (either a bike or car), or panorama. On 10 September 2014, Mapillary announced that they now support panoramas and spherical photos. As of May 2014, Mapillary had around 0.5 million photos and by December 2014, it had over 5.5 million. As of March 2015 it had 10 million photos, and by June 11, 2015, Mapillary had over 20 million photos. As of November 15, 2016 Mapillary had over 100 million photos. In August 2023 Mapillary reached 2 billion photos. Mapillary images, millions ==See also== Google Street View KartaView List of street view services OpenStreetMap Web mapping ==External links==

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