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Comment by zzleeper | Hacker News Reader

I still do not know how is this actionable. So, they have satellites that take cool pictures, ok. Are they selling the stuff? Sharing an API?

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This is afaict a pr buzz piece. They apparently are hiring.

I think this is also surveilance-wash so to speak. Look at our cool team, look at our wonderful use cases. Don't think about how it can track the movement of everybody in a city from space. We're good.

Very valuable data to finance - commodities and macro trading could use this data to understand supply and demand trends, like a robust version of "Helicopter Edge": http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2013-12-19/helicopter-...

Whether it's a consumer sale (sign up via web and get an API key) I do not know, but if you have a compelling use I'm sure you can get access by talking to humans. In terms of what you can use it for, I know people have built applications on top of Planet Labs to run queries from counting the number of cars in Walmart parking lots every day for hedge funds to tracking deforestation.

> but if you have a compelling use I'm sure you can get access by talking to humans.

So they make money by potential customers guessing at what they can provide them and reaching out to them? Seems like a terrible way to do business.

Unless I missed it (which would be easy; damn is it hard to get to the content on that site) I see no information about anything other than what they do internally. Which is cool but that's about where it ends.

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