StreetCred is a company trying to tokenize the massive mapping industry. The users will be rewarded with the tokens when they share the locations and photos of the place that they visit. Let's look into this new blockchain product in detail that might disrupt Mapping Industry.
Highly Centralized Mapping Industry
The Mapping industry is highly centralized with only very few companies having all the mapping data namely Google, Yelp, Uber, and Pokemon GO. The applications have a lot of location data; namely restaurants, pubs, offices, streets and even ATM location data. This data is captured by them, and they have taken years for them to collect and was also very expensive.
The information provided by the above companies is also not perfect. Sometimes we end up in a dead-end following the maps and also the restaurants are closed by the time we arrive, where the timing is wrong in the maps. A new company which wants to capture all the location data is very expensive, and it is nearly impossible to collect all the data captured by Google once again. The Mapping data is not only inaccurate, but also very centralized.
StreetCred Providing Solution for Mapping
StreetCred team is trying to create a better solution for this Mapping data by tokenizing it. The users are rewarded in tokens if they share the location data with pictures. Thus, one can easily buy the Mapping data from StreetCred using its tokens. By this way, Mapping industry is becoming decentralized and also rewards its users for sharing the information. This will provide extensive mapping data from across the world since currently Google or any other application does not reward users for their data.
CEO of StreetCred Randy Meech explained that if one wants to build another Uber or Google or Pokemon GO, it would be very difficult and highly expensive to gather all the location data. But in StreetCred the location data is captured by users and since they are rewarded in Tokens, it would be easier to collect millions of points of interests easily in a decentralized manner. Since it is decentralized, it would also be censorship-resistant and the data won't be hidden like that we see in Google Maps.
Team Behind StreetCred
Randy Meech is the CEO of StreetCred and he has vast experience in the Mapping industry serving as CTO in MapQuest and also CEO in Mapzen. Mazen is the subsidiary company of Samsung that provides Mapping solution. In Mapzen only Randy met StreeCred's co-founder Diana Shkolnikov. The company was started due to the sudden shutdown of Mapzen.
Even if Mapzen has already been shut down, Randy is not giving up on StreetCred. He argues that since blockchain technology is decentralized, it is not that easy to shut down if they got the protocol and data economy correct. Below is his quote on using blockchain technology to one's advantage to help the society and people.
“It’s a very natural way to open up and decentralize the data and also to build a payment mechanism around that.”
StreetCred Explained in Layman Terms
StreetCred is nothing but a location sharing app like that of Foursquare and will collect location data from people by rewarding the users with its tokens. So the location data would be stored in the blockchain in a decentralized manner and any companies who want to buy Location data should first buy the StreetCred tokens, and using the tokens, they can buy the data.
In layman terms, we can say that it is another Foursquare but in a decentralized blockchain based technology, giving the power to the people. This is one example and use case of the Token economy and many other use cases are slowly getting Tokenized. That why blockchain experts are predicting that "World would be Tokenized in the future."
