Impressed with Google Street View? Meet the company that does the job for Google 

Chances are that you might have seen the 'weird' or 'spying' cars, with 360-degree cameras set on top, in various parts of the country, and wondered what those cars were up to. 

These 'curious' cars belong to Decode Ltd, a local company currently in charge of Google's Street View project in Bangladesh, and they currently have six cars. Five of the cars go to work for eight hours every day, while one remains on standby in case one of the five cars runs into a problem. On the roads where the cars cannot enter, they plan to engage motorbikes there. 

The street view project has been making significant headway in Bangladesh in recent years. You will find very few streets in Dhaka where Google doesn't provide street view. It has made progress in many other parts of the country as well. For example, click on Google for Dhaka-Chattogram, Dhaka-Sylhet or Dhaka-Rajshahi highway street views, and you will see crystal clear images uploaded between the 2021-22 timeframe. 

Except for the images uploaded before 2020 from Bangladesh, which Google took on its own, the latest work for Google Street View has been carried out by Decode. 

Google Street View at present is operating in Bangladesh on a very large scale. Around 186,000 km of streets will come under the street view project. Google conducted test runs before Decode got the contract in 2020, and ever since, the local company has been doing the job.

Decode's street view project requires advanced logistics, but in a concise form. For instance, everything can be done by its team of 15-20 people, who are building data for the entire country, with 10 on the field and 7-8 in a lab. If it were a manual job, Decode may have needed 500 people. 

At present, Decode, one of the pioneer IT-enabled companies in Bangladesh founded in 1997, works as a single contractor for Google in Bangladesh. 

In the two and half decades of its journey, Decode has endeavoured not only in IT-enabled work, but also, in making drama series and large-scale animation development projects, various knowledge-driven businesses, and walked a tightrope between success and failure to survive the odds. 

The pioneer in photogrammetry in Bangladesh 

As a pioneer IT-enabled company, Decode has a myriad of digital footprints, but it is photogrammetry that Decode is best known for, since it was the first company to bring it to Bangladesh. 

So what is photogrammetry? It is the science and technology of obtaining reliable information about physical objects and the environment through the process of recording, measuring and interpreting photographic images and patterns of electromagnetic radiant imagery and other phenomena. 

And that endeavour came through a partnership and assistance of the Danish International Development Agency (Danida) in the early 2000s. 

"What they did… they used to select a company in Bangladesh and select a company of the same category in Denmark. Then they would ask both the companies if they wanted to work as a joint venture. If an agreement was reached, they would take on our soft knowledge enhancement, including manpower training for free," said Sarwar Alam, founding managing director of Decode. 

Danida provided Decode and its Danish counterpart with around $1 million in grants. The grant, however, didn't come in the format of physical money. "We would send people to Denmark and they would train us in photogrammetry. With it, through satellite image, aerial photography, drone… various geographic parameters can be analysed," explained Sarwar. 

This is one of the major tasks Decode is still doing with different government agencies in Bangladesh. They take satellite images from companies like Maxar or Planet etc. Various government agencies take satellite photos from Decode for various purposes. 

Then the client, for example, asks for specific requirements – a 3D model on a particular part. 

"The third DAP [Detailed Area Plan] was based on satellite images where RAJUK asked us to conduct the ground survey for them, for example, the digital elevation model, surface model etc," Sarwar said. "We were part of it."

'Decoding' the journey 

Decode started its journey by transforming raster images (representing a two-dimensional picture as a rectangular matrix or grid of square pixels) into digital formats in its early days. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, this was a thing in the West. Western companies would send Decode raster images to make them digital. 

Sarwar Alam established the IT-enabled Decode in 1997.  

"We started with foreign work. We worked with American firms on Geographic Information System (GIS) related tasks," Sarwar said. "In America and Europe, there was large-scale digitisation of all raster images back then. All the raster images of plans, drawings, house plans, road plans, municipality plans etc were digitised through a vector. Since there was no computer back in the day, it used to be drawn by hand. These hand-drawn images were called raster images." 

"We worked on CAD [Computer Aided Design] back then. Many American companies used to send us photos, [and] we would convert them into Vector on CAD software and send them back. That was our first job in the GIS [Geographic Information System] sector. Suppose you have an older image, you take a photo of it and email it to us. We transform the photo, digitise it and send it back to you. That was the first task we did.

"We were one of the pioneer companies in exporting IT-enabled services. That is what we continue to do today, but we have gone through transformations," he added. 

The story of Decode goes hand in hand with its founder Sarwar Alam – who also served as the president of BASIS in the early 2000s. 

Sarwar started his career at the Pakistan Atomic Commission. He resigned from the commission in 1975 and ventured into full-fledged businesses instead. At the Commission, he had comprehensive training in computer and IT in the 1960s. 

Animation: The adventure that became a liability 

Decode was responsible for producing five to six episodes of the famous Mina cartoon. It entailed partnering with 50-100 artists back then. 

"Back then it was frame-by-frame hand-drawn works. For every minute, there used to be at least 10 drawings… then they had to be scanned, movements added with voice dubbing, editing, etc." 

But the major animation work for Decode was a series called Adventure of Sydney. During that time, they trained around 400 artists. 

"They were all art institute students. They used to work with us from 3 pm till night, and attend classes in the morning," Sarwar said, adding,  "some very good animators came from there. They run small-scale boutique studios now." 

The animation project of Decode, however, became a liability and they couldn't continue with it anymore. "Number one, we don't have technical manpower here. We may have people for smaller tasks, but not for work on an industrial scale. And its logistics infrastructure is very expensive.  You need at least Tk50 crore capital for a successful platform. No investor or bank is yet ready to invest in this sector in Bangladesh," Sarwar said. 

Sarwar, however, is a hopeful man. He still dreams of making the animation project a success one day. "We want to start the project on a large scale someday. We are looking for better days, and global partners," he said. 

Decode, in its diverse portfolio also developed TV serials like 'Ekannoborti' and '69', written and directed by Anisul Huq and Mostofa Sarwar Faruki, in the early 2000s. 

A business 'driven by knowledge' and innovation 

"Our motto is we want to do a new type of thing, which is not here. We went to be in the knowledge business. It is much more interesting if you are successful, and very rewarding," Sarwar said. 

Decode's street view project requires advanced logistics, but in a concise form. For instance, everything can be done by its team of 15-20 people, who are building data for the entire country, with 10 on the field and 7-8 in a lab. If it were a manual job, Decode may have needed 500 people. 

This work alone, when the entire task is completed, will be worth around $50 million.  

And the beauty of this task is it never ends. 

The street views have to be updated every two and three years as new roads will be added. For example, when Purbachal is built, it will become a town soon after, and it is yet to be on Google Street View. 

In a developing country like ours where small roads are getting bigger, roadside scenarios are changing, more has to be added.