I built a live map of the world, and I am giving it away

Project Argus went live today. Before anything else: it is at project-argus.reputcon.com, it is free, and you do not need an account beyond an email.

I want to explain what it is and why I gave it away, because the second part is the bit people keep asking about.

What it actually is

It is a live map of the world with everything I could get onto it.

Aircraft, thousands of them, civil and military, in the air and on the ground. Click any dot and you get altitude, speed, heading, registration. Ships and tankers at sea. Earthquakes, wildfires, volcanoes, storms and conflict zones, appearing as they get reported. Over ten thousand public traffic and city cameras, so you can actually look at a road in Helsinki or a junction in California. Satellites and the ISS, tracked in real time. Gold, oil, treasuries, dozens of currency pairs. And the news wire, pinned to the place each story happened rather than sitting in a list.

More than forty live feeds, running at once, on one map. Nothing to install. You open it and it is already going.

Why it is free

I kept getting asked what the catch is, so let me answer it properly.

There is no catch. There is no trial that runs out, no card, no seat count, no upgrade waiting at the end. I am not going to email you a sales sequence because you looked at a map.

I built it because I think we should be able to see what is happening in the world without paying someone for the privilege. That is genuinely the whole reason. Most of what is on that map is being watched by someone already, usually by companies who charge a lot for the view. I did not like that much, so I made a version anyone can open.

It cost me real money to build and it costs me real money to run. I am fine with that. If some of the people who use it end up curious about what else I make, brilliant. If they never do, it still stays free. I am not going to pretend that is pure altruism, but it is also not a funnel with a nice story on top. The map works whether you ever speak to me or not.

Who I actually built it for

Honestly, at the start, me. I wanted it to exist.

But the people it seems to suit are the ones whose job is knowing what is moving and where. Logistics teams working out whether to send a ship the long way round. Insurers watching a storm develop over somewhere they have exposure. Network operators trying to work out if a country just went dark. Journalists checking whether a claim holds up. Anyone who currently has eight tabs open trying to answer one question.

If that is you, I think you will get it immediately.

The bit I am most pleased with

There is a trade desk in there, and it does something I have not seen given away before.

You can plan a shipping route and compare it against another one. Not just distance, but transit time, the weather sitting along the path, fuel cost, and the current risk status of every chokepoint the route depends on. Suez, Hormuz, the Taiwan Strait, Malacca, the Turkish Straits. Each one showing alert, watch or clear as things change.

Here is a real example from earlier today. Shanghai to Rotterdam through Suez is about 10,138 nautical miles and 21 days. The same trip around the Cape of Good Hope is 13,706 miles and 28.6 days, and burns roughly 777,000 dollars more in fuel.

That is a decision worth three quarters of a million pounds, and until now you would have needed a subscription to see it laid out like that. Now you can just look.

You can also drop in your own ports, plants or suppliers as a spreadsheet, and it will flag any of them sitting near something that is currently on fire.

How this fits with the rest of what I do

My actual business, Reputcon, is the close-up view. One business, or a group of them, watched carefully. What people are saying, what competitors are doing, what to actually do about it.

Argus is the same instinct pointed the other way. Instead of one business, the whole world.

Same idea underneath, wildly different altitude. I liked that enough to build it.

Go and have a look

It is at project-argus.reputcon.com.

Give it a few seconds to load everything, then zoom into somewhere you know. Most people go straight to their own town, then to whatever is in the news that week. Both are worth doing.

If you find something broken, or something you wish it did, tell me. I read everything.