Having a proper look, this was actually in mid-2014: https://www.digital-democracy.org/blog/we-built-a-drone/ https://www.digital-democracy.org/blog/we-built-a-

Having a proper look, this was actually in mid-2014: https://www.digital-democracy.org/blog/we-built-a-drone/ https://www.digital-democracy.org/blog/we-built-a-drone/ I don't think Planet Labs were scaled up at that point! There are a few other issues: potential lack of high bandwidth internet connection makes subscriptions a problem. Price is almost certainly an issue - all the parts for this project were donated; to give an idea they're making replacement parts out of beer crates. However Digital Democracy could be an intermediary here and some of Planet Labs's goals are targeted towards humanitarian efforts. Resolution is going to be an order of magnitude better than a satellite image, probably < 0.1m with a GoPro. Maybe that's important for producing evidence of mining or logging? A big part of this is empowerment. They built it, they can repair it, they capture the data and they process it.