campchase

LOL I need to look that up

I would imagine major US/European cities are pretty well-served in this regard by annual and semi-annual aerial surveys. But that still leaves a lot of smaller cities who aren’t pro-actively covered by Nearmap/Hexagon/etc. They are part of the long, long tail that is criminally underserved today.

I agree. The first time I wrote about this same frustration a couple years changed my whole life—it’s how I wound up at my current job and something I still believe in very deeply: https://joemorrison.medium.com/the-commercial-satellite-imag...

Thanks for taking the time to write this out, great info.

There are two hallmarks of an application that differentiate it from a data service:

1. Earth observation is a minority of the data that it manages and maintains

2. Users are not just presented with information, they are prompted to take action

I would argue that levels L3 and L4 are probably falling into the same trap as the data feeds I described in the blog post. Do you know if USGS publishes download metrics are available for each dataset associated with Landsat, for instance? I bet if you made a ratio of time/investment to downloads, you'd find L2 outperforms all other categories. But I could be wrong; I have never seen the download data and don't know the relative levels of effort to produce each dataset they offer.

Great observation. Check out Descartes Labs (all-purpose platform) or Picterra (closer to CountThings for sat imagery) as two examples of companies trying to make it easier to build personalized models.

Thank you, I will do that in the future.

Unfortunately, physics won't allow for that - with optical instruments you need a big aperture (lens) or you need to fly much lower than Starlink, or both. 1 or 2m imagery may definitely be possible, though! Check out BlackSky for reference.

Interesting example! Planet sometimes describes themselves as "Bloomberg for Earth Observation" or something along those lines.

No, but I'm close with Albedo who is pursuing the same strategy in vis and IR: https://albedo.com/

That's very interesting, I don't know anything about the consumer data industry.

I agree, the new title is way better. To whoever changed it: thanks!

Thanks for the perspective, Glen. I've often heard this referred to as the "long tail" problem for satellite imagery providers. The area under the curve is enormous, but any one algorithm only serves an extremely niche audience.

Another analogy I use a lot: satellite imagery is like salt. The dish can have lots of ingredients (in a military context: HUMINT, OSINT, SIGINT, etc.) And the satellite imagery can make the whole dish. But you never want to consume it in isolation, that would be disgusting.

Also, full disclosure, I work for a satellite imagery provider (https://umbra.space/) where we're executing on the "just sell data" strategy, so I'm fully corrupted as far as seeing the Truth when my own ego and self interest is inextricably wrapped up in this debate.

That's great feedback, I will avoid .gifs in my future blog posts. I can see how that would be distracting and an accessibility issue.

The satellite imagery industry is quite small in terms of the people who work in it. I love and respect the people who have built the same products that I am indirectly critiquing in this piece.

This is a cool industry, because most of the effort is going toward things like monitoring the effects of climate change, or mapping natural disasters in real time to support crisis response, or illuminating human rights violations around the world. Rooting against the people working on that is icky.

In my opinion, we're all competing against obscurity (who buys satellite data today?!), not each other.

You are right - I wasn't really writing it for a general audience, more for the few thousand people that are working every day in the commercial satellite imagery industry. There's no specific context to understand (beyond that I repeat myself constantly, so for regular readers of mine none of what I outlined in this essay is news).

That is, indeed, exactly what I am arguing. Either:

* Just sell data or;

* Just sell applications powered by your proprietary source of data

Do not:

* Sell derived/refined data as a half-measure

* Sell both applications and wholesale data at the same time

If you feel like that doesn't make sense, you are not alone. Almost everyone in the industry disagrees with my views on this topic based on how they run their businesses. Satellogic is one notable exception. But I can't think of a single other provider that would agree with me.

I don't mind you saying this - I think my style is very off-putting to some. The same things that disenchant you about the style are what make others love it. I try to be entertaining and informative, rather than just informative, because that's what makes it enjoyable for me. But like all entertainment, it's stylized, so it will put some people off. Hopefully you found the content valuable, at least!

I sell satellite imagery. I want more people to start application companies, and less people to start data feed companies. "Preaching" is the most scalable way to try to convince people to change tack. I can't personally start dozens of application companies, but I can hopefully help spur the founding of those firms through my writing.

Not broadly true in my opinion. To give an example from the financial services industry:

* Satellite provider or analytics firm sells "car counts" for retail stores

* Financial institution is intrigued; this must correlate with sales, right?

* But..why don't we just buy credit card transaction data and foot traffic data from clearing houses and GPS trace providers?

I often liken satellite imagery to salt. It's great to finish a dish, but should never be consumed alone. If you don't believe the foot traffic data or credit card transaction data you're buying, you can use satellite data to check it or refine the model. But that's a niche within a niche.

The other issue I pointed out in that article is customer savvy--if you're a quant fund sophisticated enough to make use of an arcane data feed, you're very likely sophisticated enough to generate that feed yourself from raw data. And if you do it yourself, it's suddenly part of a "proprietary" solution. So you'd rather just buy images and do the heavy lifting that pay a premium to buy a data feed that doesn't quite solve your problem by itself.

Thanks, Terry

I agree-most of my observations here do not apply broadly beyond the satellite imagery. One of my favorite resources for learning how "data as a service" businesses work (when they work) is the "World of DaaS" podcast that Auren Hoffman hosts: https://www.safegraph.com/podcasts

Author here - not an original insight, although it's clichéd enough that I can't point you to where I picked it up from.

I also want to emphasize that I do not view bias as a bad thing in the context of supervised models. In some ways, I think it's the whole point of a supervised model (to inherit the judgment of its creators). If the bias helps filter predictions that are useful for your goals, it's a good thing.

I check this every morning. The best part is the contract announcement section imo. You can get a feel both for the pace of the industry and the changing customer base at a very concrete/low level after a couple of weeks of reading just that section.

Do you think the other version is clearer, though? I think he’s right. I will probably update it.

Interesting, I’m unfamiliar with Cassegrain reflectors.

I sympathize. I sell stuff without a price tag all the time--it's the trap of having large, high-paying customers and trying to lean down to serve small customers. They're incompatible sales motions, and the effort to set up an entirely independent, second distribution model is very expensive and time consuming so it doesn't seem worth investing in.

Planet has hundreds of cube sats in orbit already. Low and medium resolution data is not suitable for most commercial use cases. The only way to get high res data is from big lenses = big satellites = big costs. I agree that cubes sats are exciting especially for non-optical use cases like blanketing the earth with internet or GPS-RO or Synthetic Aperture Radar. But they are not a game-changer for visible-spectrum earth observation data in my opinion.

Thanks for your feedback, Paul! To your points:

1. Medium is crappy, agreed. I would prefer to use Ghost and might do that in the future. They say on the internet, no one knows you're a dog, but I guess you are the exception to the rule.

2. Use of scatological language is kind of my specialty. I mean, shit!

3. You say I'm missing the point and then go on to make two points that don't really address the argument I made. Maybe you are the the one that missed the point. But what do I know, I'm just a dog that likes shit.

I've never posted on Hacker News before, but since getting introduced to this community yesterday, I figured I would try contributing something.

I personally find the work Pixel8 is doing to make positionally accurate, high-definition 3D scanning possible to do with commodity smartphones thrilling. It's akin to making cutting-edge archaeological techniques accessible for everyone. And the stuff that will be built on top of these maps (autonomous vehicles delivering your pizza, AR games like Pokemon Go but much more interactive, insanely detailed asset inventories, etc.) are pretty exciting to think about, too.