Planet to Acquire Terra Bella from Google
planet.com
planet.com
I don't imagine this will hurt anyone during this administration. But down the road, these policies may bite out of those enacting them. Take care, with your own firms and when you're given questionable instructions, to treat your shareholders fairly.
In this case, the the total value is the sale value + continued access to data (including data from Planet's other medium resolution satellites) after the sale via the contract. How certain are you that the cash offered was more valuable than the current deal?
FYI: I'm an outsider whose only source is the article
Satellite imagery companies try to differentiate by higher resolution or alternative imagery formats like multi-spectral.
The bigger issue for Google specifically is that those types of clients are best served with a lot of handholding, and not with the self-service, mass-consumption sales model Google prefers. Also it's not a market they're ever likely to dominate.
Agriculture, forestry, construction and mining sectors are particularly amenable to satellite analysis, provided you know where the assets to be monitored are.
https://medium.com/@V.K.Komissarov/moment-of-truth-for-new-s...
Actually, the whole blog is worth bookmarking if you're into this field.
But the change is real. Google has been gradually become more and more conventional. That probably was what Larry wanted in the move of creating Alphabet, after all.
"Before Apple’s Steve Jobs died in 2011, he told Google cofounder and CEO Larry Page that his company was trying to do too much. As Page later told the Financial Times, he replied, “If we just do the same things we did before and don’t do something new, it seems like a crime to me." Yet Page also acknowledged that Jobs was right in one sense: he could manage only so many things before too many would get lost in the shuffle."
http://www.afr.com/technology/how-steve-jobs-last-advice-to-...
This is such a strange statement to me. Is there really a chance the reader will get confused and think that Steve spoke after he died?
>>> We’ve not heard a firm price. Aside from the $300 million figure we heard, another described Terra Bella as essentially being “donated” to Planet.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/25/google-satellite-planet/
[1] "As part of this agreement, a number of Terra Bella employees will join Planet to continue their great work within our combined organization."
[2] Its cynical I know but given how important maps is to Google, and how important satellite imagery is to maps, this is not an easy move to explain as anything other than cutting out the cost of the employees.
I wonder if they just decided that they had been beat into the space (DigitalGlobe has 5 satellites capturing higher resolution than Skybox 1 and 2. It also isn't obvious that the Skybox satellites can even cover the same area; DigitalGlobe crows about their daily acquisition rate, Skybox doesn't mention it).
I think Google could have contracts with Digital Globe and/or Planet to provide them with imaging data for a certain period of time.
To be more precise, I expect Google is working up to a sort of "Google Prime" where they can bundle a bunch of things you get for free or pay a small fee for into a subscription service. Perhaps youtube red, maybe some extra storage space, maps, and some gizmos on gmail accounts. Anything to harvest a bit more money from the users as the revenue from search ads erodes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6Douyfa7l8
At least for disaster relief, in Asia, too:
https://maps.googleblog.com/2011/03/new-imagery-of-japan-aft...
"Today, we’ve published imagery of the Sendai region at even higher resolution, which we collected on Sunday and Monday."
Note the "we collected" and how it's called just imagery, instead of "satellite imagery" as in the previous paragraph. A thread with operational details:
https://community.apan.org/hadr/japan_earthquake/f/f629b959-...
It's also available for resale:
http://sendai.hmdc.harvard.edu/cga_website_files/PDF_misc/Go...
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Planet Labs is thrilled to announce that we have entered into an agreement with Google, wherein Planet will acquire the Terra Bella business including the SkySat constellation of satellites, and Google upon closing, will enter into a multi-year contract to purchase Earth-imaging data from Planet.
I can speak for everyone at Planet when I say that we’re incredibly excited about this opportunity. We’ve long admired what the team at Terra Bella has achieved and we think the SkySat constellation of 7 high resolution satellites is highly complementary to Planet’s existing medium resolution 60-satellite fleet. The former enable regular, rapidly updated snapshots of select areas of the globe at sub-meter resolution; the latter regular, global coverage at 3-5 meter resolution. The two systems under one roof will be truly unique and will enable valuable new capabilities.
Planet will distribute SkySat data through Planet’s suite of geospatial offerings. Planet’s global medium-resolution imagery has proven to be of great value in the commercial market, enabling us to exceed our revenue goals in 2016. With Terra Bella, Planet will diversify its available data and solutions and be able to serve new customers and markets.
As part of this agreement, a number of Terra Bella employees will join Planet to continue their great work within our combined organization. We’re honoured and pleased to welcome Terra Bella to the Planet family and look forward to working with the Google team.
“When we thought about a company that shares Terra Bella’s passion and strengths in high frequency satellite imaging, Planet was a natural home,” said Jen Fitzpatrick, VP of Product and Engineering, Google. “Terra Bella has accomplished a lot in the past two years—including the design and launch of five more satellites. We’re excited to see what’s ahead for Terra Bella, and look forward to being a long-term customer.”
“From the start, Planet and Terra Bella have shared similar visions and approached aerospace technology from a like-minded position, and while our on-orbit assets and data are different, together we bring unique and valuable capabilities to users,” said Terra Bella Co-Founder John Fenwick. “Planet and Terra Bella together enables the continuation of our mission and makes for an ever-stronger business.”
With this acquisition, rapid business growth, and the largest launches yet for both Terra Bella and Planet scheduled for this year, this will no doubt be Planet’s most impactful year yet!
The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including the receipt of regulatory approvals in the US.
Have there been many other Google acquisitions that turned into divestments?
altitudewavelength/aperture = pixel size
Planet's cubesats are at ~500km and visible light is ~500nm, and cubesats are at most 10cm per unit, so resolution is just:
5e55e-7/1e-1= 2.5 (all in meters).
There are some games you can play with super high contrast to improve on that, but it's pretty close to a hard limit. So to improve, you need a larger cubesat platform, like perhaps a 12-unit cubesat for up to 20cm aperture (1.25m resolution) or even a 27-u cubesat for 30cm aperture, but at that point, you're talking about a custom cubesat launcher (although the 12u one isn't too bad), and you might as well just develop a different platform that isn't constrained so much by the cubesat standard.
Which makes the Terra Bella merger make sense.
The optimum size of a cheap, disposable (6-12 month lifespan until deorbit due to the extremely low altitude) mass constellation of tiny Earth observation satellites is probably a little bit larger than the cubesat platform. And if you're launching them often enough (and Planet is, since they make up a huge proportion of the total number of cubesats ever launched... I think the majority?), you can afford to develop your own standard.
ISS's ability to launch cubesats is something that's fairly easy to upgrade and has been upgraded in the past. And other launchers for larger satellites from ISS have been used. And, of course, the same thing applies to secondaries on other rockets or even dedicated launches.
(4kg/satellite)*(50 satellites) is only 200kg. You could increase that to 10kg per satellite for a larger platform and you're still at just half a ton, which is pretty small for a secondary payload still, with the potential for sub-meter resolution, so I definitely see an upgrade beyond the 3U cubesat in Planet's future.
[1] There's a factor of 1.22 in there for circular apertures for the usual definition of resolving power (i.e. overlapping of the minimum of the Airy's disc of one point source with the maximum of the other... this being a case where you're trying to resolve two bright sources from each other). But again, this is for bright sources and there's assumptions about contrast ratio when discussing resolving power, so generally speaking, I just use "1" instead of "1.22", since "1" is a little more conservative and relevant to more than just two bright sources next to each other with a dark background.
What they do get you is a cheap payload that maybe is "good enough" for certain applications. The issue is Planet is realizing they are not "good enough" for mapping applications.
It's easy to get an image of (say) Haiti right _after_ the earthquake - you know the disaster just happened. But it's really nice to have an image of Haiti right _before_ the earthquake so you know where the damage happened, so you want baseline imagery of every city in the world to better direct post-disaster relief efforts. The more up-to-date, the better.
It's good for identifying areas where illegal logging operations are happening _right now_ - Count the trees in at-risk areas on a daily basis to track illegal logging groups.
Or image every port on the planet to identify international shipping trends and monitor loading / unloading efficiencies.
Or image every soybean plantation in the world to check crop health. [insert crop type above for the ag industry you're interested in]
Or image every major glacier every day and correlate it with temperature data to gather more scientific data about climate change and sea level predictions.
All these are simultaneously achievable with a flock of >100 3U cubesats taking ~4m resolution imagery. They are not possible with a half dozen ~1M resolution conventional satellites... Maybe you could do one of the above things.
There's a lot of value there - the more conventional satellites add to it, for sure, but they're not going to totally replace it anytime soon.