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The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

• faldore 4y ago
  This seems like the kind of insight that is better monetized than preached - the value will not be perceived until there is a business success that derived from it.
  • campchase 4y ago
    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.
    • ackbar03 4y ago
      > I want more people to start application companies Are you aware of ways for a hypothetical start-up team to get cheap/affordable raw imagery data to attempt this? Instead of paying B2B prices upfront just for experimentation?
      • alibarber 4y ago
        A good place to start might be the public space agencies, for example: https://scihub.copernicus.eu/ https://scihub.copernicus.eu/
• altdataseller 4y ago
  Is this true for all datasets that financial institutions might want to buy or only satellite imagery?
  • ska 4y ago
    I suspect it is at least approximately true of all data sets that are both broadly applicable and difficult to acquire (i.e. requires domain expertise to acquire).
  • ARandumGuy 4y ago
    I think this applies to a lot of types of data. Selling "insights" is really just selling a filtered version of the raw data. If the client's needs match up with your filters, then you've saved them a lot of work. However, if the filters don't match up perfectly with the client's needs then they'll need to do filtering and processing themselves. And in that case, they'll likely get better results just working with the raw data, instead of whatever data you think they need.
  • campchase 4y ago
    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.
    • noplsbecivil 4y ago
      This was our experience with car count data which we sold to most of the sophisticated quant funds a few years back. We sold 'raw counts' and our own 'derived counts' that took into account cloud cover etc and was produced by our data science team. The quant funds completely disregarded our derived counts as useless.
• annoyingnoob 4y ago
  I found the animated gifs distracting, it took away from whatever you are trying to convey (for me).
  • woah 4y ago
    https://makeagif.com/i/RLd9kS https://makeagif.com/i/RLd9kS
  • dylan604 4y ago
    Yeah, I have decided I'm just too old for this style. Something wants to be serious, but then it tries to be cute by adding all of the GIFs that do nothing to enhance. I'm all for adding media in whatever format that adds to the understanding of the material. These kinds of garnishes are no better than the animated backgrounds of MySpace and Web1.0 days. Now, get off my lawn!!!
  • annoyingnoob 4y ago
    https://www.cameronsworld.net https://www.cameronsworld.net
    • WestCoastJustin 4y ago
      Fan of https://zombo.com/ https://zombo.com/ myself.
  • campchase 4y ago
    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!
    • bromuro 4y ago
      Please, think about us living in poor countries with expensive and slow internet connections.
• pseudostem 4y ago
  >In my opinion, every supervised machine learning model is hopelessly biased by the intent of its creator(s). Namely, it inherits the bias of its training dataset (both geographic and semantic). Profound. And True. Sometimes I wonder whether we can truly call them learning models at all.
  • bmelton 4y ago
    Bias is learned behavior, so it seems that "learning models" is precisely the right name for it despite whether we considered the ramifications of learning
  • campchase 4y ago
    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.
    • kk58 4y ago
      We can walk around bias through self supervision with sampling techniques to select training pairs
  • charcircuit 4y ago
    It's why they are called models and not just "how it works" or absolute truth.
    • Frost1x 4y ago
      I know several industries filled with questionable researchers who might disagree with you. For clarity, I agree with you for most all cases.
  • NoPicklez 4y ago
    You can call them learning models, the same way our kids "learn" in environments that are also biased.
• Eric_WVGG 4y ago
  > Allow me to put it more succinctly: selling derived data as a subscription product does. not. work. I don’t care what it is. The juice is never worth the squeeze.¹ Count cars. Count airplanes. Count ships. Segment land cover. Track oil inventories. Estimate biofuels. Measure water levels. Etc. Etc. Etc. I see that he outlined a few exceptions at the footnote… I'll also add Plaid. I think this guy is making some huge generalizations that don't hold up beyond his industry. But that said, I recently downgraded two potential startups based on data feeds to personal projects because I realized that nobody really pays for data, and if there is any value then the providers will figure that out inevitably… Another recent example: I've been using Deliveries for Mac and iOS for over fifteen years, a very simple, perfectly-designed, laser focused app. Both Amazon (not surprising) and Fed Ex (quite surprising) have decided that freely providing delivery dates to consumers is too valuable to leave to third parties, so the beloved app is shuttering sometime this year. https://junecloud.com/journal/iphone/the-future-of-deliveries.html https://junecloud.com/journal/iphone/the-future-of-deliverie...
  • inglor 4y ago
    I agree - some more exceptions: Hedge funds and VCs as well as brokers and other investors definitely _do_ pay for insights on top of public data feeds. TipRanks (worked there 2012-2017) is a big'ish (profitable) company doing (mostly) exactly that.
  • dmitriid 4y ago
    I found his own Twitter mini-feed he linked more valuable than the article: https://twitter.com/mouthofmorrison/status/1515327507079348231 https://twitter.com/mouthofmorrison/status/15153275070793482...
  • altdataseller 4y ago
    “recently downgraded two potential startups based on data feeds to personal projects” Do you mean as an investment or place to work? And what type of data feeds were they, broadly?
    • theobeers 4y ago
• joeframbach 4y ago
  This post seems to begin _in media res_. I feel like I'm missing a lot of context here. What exactly are we complaining about? Did some event happen?
  • campchase 4y ago
    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).
• terrycrowley 4y ago
  This is a great example of the end-to-end argument. Putting smarts in the middle doesn't end up working because you lose the ability to optimize for the application semantics at the ends. It's an "argument" so not guaranteed to be true in all cases but applies here (according to the writer - I know nothing about the specifics of this technology/industry). But interesting to see the pattern recreated.
  • campchase 4y ago
    Thanks, Terry
• countvonbalzac 4y ago
  I'm confused what the author is trying to argue? 1. People don't want satellite data they want their problem to be solved So a company like Planet shouldn't (just) get satellite data they should solve problems. 2. Companies can't do 2 things at once well So Planet actually has to choose between solving problems or just getting satellite data 3. Companies like Arturo have good focus and solve the problem of climate risk for insurance So Arturo should stay focused on that, but where do they get the data from? Planet right? So Planet does have a set of customers for its data? -- Edit: I re-read the article and maybe I'm just confused on the wording. Is he saying that raw data is valuable and worthwhile for satellite companies to sell but they should not do anything to the data before try to sell it?
  • campchase 4y ago
    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.
    • campchase 4y ago
      Also, full disclosure, I work for a satellite imagery provider (https://umbra.space/ 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.
      • RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
        Do yall have any plan to do work in the vis/IR space?
        • 4y ago
• waynecochran 4y ago
  I love this attitude: I am not rooting for people to fail. We’re building an industry together, not playing a zero-sum game Of course this is not the way many folks see industry competition. I think, for example, Intel, AMD, and nVidia can all "win." In fact, when one improves they can all move forward.
  • campchase 4y ago
    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.
    • newbamboo 4y ago
      I predict this changing in 5 years or less, as demand increases and the profit potential attracts new money. Hope I’m wrong about that, because as you say there’s so much untapped potential value for a bunch of disparate, but critically important fields.
    • ravenRegent 4y ago
      As someone who just got out of one of the thousands of "new" startups to now be at a boring run of the mill software firm... i grapple with this a lot. 90% of the work I did was on defense stuff (i think you wrote about it before) but that 10% supporting NGOs or deforestation or ESA/NASA research grants always keeps gnawing at me to run back into the space. Its tough to tell if a RS company really has their money where there mouth is on stuff like that until you work there.
• teamga 4y ago
  Weather alerts?
  • lmc 4y ago
    Weather data is usually derived from geostationary satellites which is sort of an adjacent field to the lower-orbit imagery the article is based on (i believe?)... but i know of a couple of projects doing analytics here - not sure about commercial potential though, they're early stage startups or academia.
    • campchase 4y ago
      You are correct. I’m talking mainly about low Earth orbit satellites. There are some LEO weather satellites or concepts - Tomorrow.io is a notable one.
  • counters 4y ago
    Even more complicated and less obvious than some of the other sorts of Earth observations that the author talks about. I could write about this all day, but I'll start with the obvious: you're competing against a forecast that may have been made 30 minutes ago, an hour ago, 6 hours ago, 24 hours ago, or sometimes even more. So in some cases, at best you might be alerting people that something they already expected to happen is, now, actually happening. How useful that is depends on the context. Detecting a wildfire as it ignites? Cool - but most likely, if it's near an urban area, people already saw the smoke, or people were already ready to react because a Red Flag warning was posted. Lightning strikes? Folks already heard the thunder, and hopefully would've seen a risk of thunderstorms in the forecast earlier in the day or prior. Carefully and succinctly incorporating narrow weather observations into existing forecast and alerting systems as a way to buttress them, decrease noise/boost signal, or otherwise capture a tiny bit more value than what was already there might work. But beyond that I struggle to see massive amounts of value for most of the use cases that many industries or communities wrestle with regarding weather alerting.
• EugeneOZ 4y ago
  Impossible to read because of distracting animations. The new title of this post is much better, thx - it's kind of tldr.
  • campchase 4y ago
    I agree, the new title is way better. To whoever changed it: thanks!
• GlenTheMachine 4y ago
  Me: 20 years in the defense space business. Stating my own opinion. This is basically right. The problem with space imagery is that almost everyone who wants it has a niche use case, and those few organizations without a niche use case (the US Weather Service, various militaries, etc) generally want imagery that's so specialized to their own problem that they have to spec, buy, and operate their own orbital assets. Take Ukraine as an example. Leaving aside the moral question of whether a satellite imagery company should be profiting off the Ukrainian war, Ukraine appears to be using commercial orbital imagery providers to figure out Russian troop movements. That use case is not one any commercial provider anywhere is going to build an ML model for. But analysts working on behalf of Ukraine can absolutely either use raw pixels or develop their own ML algorithms that run on top of the raw pixels to find Russian tanks. And almost every other potential user is similar. They're all looking for something different. Oil companies want to pre-screen drilling locations. NGOs want to look at deforestation in Brazil or methane leaks in Saudi Arabia. You could even go all the way down to individuals -- at the right price, individual farms might want to look at relative growth rates of corn in their fields, or soil moisture levels, etc. Or they might want to count heads of cattle or sheep, or... or... or. The point being, outside of weather, which we already know how to get to end users without having them subscribe to an orbital imagery provider service, every customer is different, and what they want from the pixels is different. It's basically the long-tail problem. In order to be profitable you have to fill an enormous number of niche use cases.
  • jlarocco 4y ago
    > Ukraine appears to be using commercial orbital imagery providers to figure out Russian troop movements. Is this really true? I guess I can believe it, but it seems strange that the United States is sending over $800 million in weaponry, but won't send over satellite imagery.
    • grog454 4y ago
      > it seems strange that the United States is sending over $800 million in weaponry, but won't send over satellite imagery. I'd guess this is because you can't publish satellite imagery without revealing a lot about your intelligence gathering capabilities.
• mmaunder 4y ago
  I want SpaceX to put cameras on their Starlink fleet and provide near real-time satellite views via a Google maps interface down to 30cm resolution across most of the planet. As they phase out old birds and deploy new ones this is feasible for them. Each bird already has connectivity. They just need the cameras.
  • maxerickson 4y ago
    Worldview-4 (a commercial 30-cm satellite) had a reasonably similar orbit and 10 times of the mass of a Starlink satellite. Even if they are able to significantly improve on that design, it's still going to be a pretty big "just need the camera". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldView-4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldView-4
  • victor22 4y ago
    I heard their new feets will be able to charge at a faster speed when sitting on a compatible pole wire.
  • campchase 4y ago
    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.
    • Frost1x 4y ago
      If you can assume the scene you're capturing is fairly static over time, you can sometimes sort of cheat physics a little bit (keeping space constant and leveraging time) by resampling areas multiple times from different perspectives and cleverly combining that data together Problem is that most the interesting bits people want more data on are quite dynamic in space and time, not just time. Even when it's not you don't gain linear subsampling improvements and eventually get diminishing returns with such approaches.
      • campchase 4y ago
• mturmon 4y ago
  I found the argument(s) interesting although the animations hurt readability and clarity. I've watched the area of commercialized remote sensing products with some interest, because I'm in the non-commercial remote sensing line. The way NASA handles derived data products is (broadly) through "levels": L0: measurement, still in instrument native units (e.g., DN's) L1: calibrated and put into physical units (e.g., watts/cm2) L2: scientifically-useful product (surface reflectance at 450nm, CO2 concentration) L3: L2 that has been aggregated into a map, possibly also across time or instrument L4: data has been filtered through a time-stepped physics-based model The lowest level that's commonly useful for applications is L2. A decent-sized satellite might have several L2 data products serving different user communities, e.g., CO2 concentration, methane concentration, and photosynthetic activity can all be recovered from remote-sensing spectroscopy, but they serve different uses. One advantage of the above decomposition is that L2-L4 data can be validated with in-situ measurements. They are not just indexes -- they are targeted at a certain physically-measurable quantity. This allows judgement whether the intermediate products (L2 CO2) are actually good, or improving. It also allows combining intermediate products from different sources (which is a hard problem). This is because both sources are trying to measure the same thing by design. It is true that (for example) current spectroscopic remote sensing allows retrieval of a lot of L2 products for diverse communities -- scores of products, from mineral abundance to urban land use to agriculture to snow/ice to algae. I do agree with OP that it will be impossible for any company to "cover the waterfront" of even half of these products. The measurement and each individual product take a lot of effort to get right. But it also seems like there are commercial opportunities for some specific such products -- e.g., methane concentration/fluxes, or Evapotranspiration/soil moisture. Wouldn't a subscription-based service to these products allow for continuous improvement of the underlying product, either through new measurements or through better algorithms? So, in a nut, in the context of OP, what's the difference between: -- an always-improving subscription-based "vertical service" for a L2 product like I just described, vs. -- a "problem-solving application" like the OP is advocating?
  • campchase 4y ago
    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.
• nightpool 4y ago
  A year or so ago there was a long-ish discussion about countthings.com—technologically, a very simple app that's seemingly found a lot of value in having a close product-market fit and being able to (efficiently) sell to customers that don't have their own ability to build custom CV solutions. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27261399 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27261399 I really understand the author's argument that lots of satellite companies are "doing this wrong", by investing lots and lots of resources into "new products" that cost a lot of money to produce but don't have a clear user story, but I wonder if there's a way to do this "right" by building very simple, customizable software that lowers the floor in terms of what sorts of customers are able to purchase satellite data feeds? Maybe even using the same software the CountThings does? This seems to be qualitatively very different from the types of "data feeds" that OP is talking about that try to measure "useful analytics", rather than working on a scalable process for shipping bespoke solutions to customers with turn-key integration. This is (one way) to tackle the long-tail problem. But maybe it runs into some other pitfalls
  • campchase 4y ago
    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.
• lokimedes 4y ago
  As someone from the industry, all I really want, is a Netflix of datasets. Planet.com, Capella, Maxar, ICEYE, AIRBUS etc.. I hate the guts of their B2B business models. I want an aggregator, I want basemaps that are refreshed on a best-effort basis (not by me buying km^2 of observations), I want standardized formats and metadata across vendors. Give me that, with some obscene, but transparent pricing structure, that lets me explore for discretionary funds and exploit for less money than triggering tenders and investment decisions. Then, then you have what will move the entire commercial earth observation industry out of the CAPEX-fryer it’s in today. For anything less, there’s stiff competition from ESA’s free Sentinel satellites.
  • altdataseller 4y ago
    Isn’t that the Snowflake Data Marketplace, AWS Marketplace and to a lesser extent Quandl?
    • campchase 4y ago
      Yeah, this ultimately probably winds up being owned by one or more cloud providers. It’s also the most common business model I see startups trying to do. It usually doesn’t work because you can’t put lipstick (flat pricing, self-service sales motion, open licensing) on a pig (janky and secretly manual integrations with misaligned data providers who view your success as a threat to their most lucrative contracts). More here: “Stop Building Satellite Imagery Platforms and Marketplaces” https://joemorrison.medium.com/stop-building-satellite-imagery-platforms-and-marketplaces-af4919a56146 https://joemorrison.medium.com/stop-building-satellite-image...
      • nicbou 4y ago
        I really enjoy reading your content. I have no use for any information, but the insight is still fascinating.
  • ackbar03 4y ago
    How plausible is this actually? The surface of the earth is huge and given the high-resolution close-to-realtime imagery that most people want, its not really possible to provide standardized sets of images that just happen to cover the region-of-interest for everyone right? Hence the need to targeted imaging.
• egberts1 4y ago
  One should be able to want a James Bond-esque tracking of my stolen car. So that one can order a pencil-sized AGM from some nation-state toward the vicinity of the carjacker or something. To just outside the reticular.
• retrocryptid 4y ago
  sure. but working in aeeospace is cool.
  • campchase 4y ago
    It is!
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• noplsbecivil 4y ago
  Me: 2 years at a satellite imagery company a few years back This is mostly true, though I will add there are some repeatable insights that people will pay for. In the financial sector, there were plenty of people who paid for car counts data back in 2016 (though many customers did not renew) and there are still people today who are interested in oil inventories data, and mall traffic data (though satellite data is being augmented there these days). The general theme of the piece is correct imo though. When the company I worked at started, we thought there would be many use cases, it became clear after a while there were only a few insights with large markets, and after that a really long tail of custom asks.
  • campchase 4y ago
    Thank you for sharing that, I find it very validating. Sometimes it’s nerve racking to publish an opinion piece like this when I know I am extrapolating from very limited and biased information. Sounds like you worked at Orbital Insight, Descartes Labs, or SpaceKnow (in order of likelihood)?
    • noplsbecivil 4y ago
      Yes i did work at one of the above. The car count data was actually more interesting than people even realized. One thing even many quant funds missed was that the quality of our 'raw counts' still depended on cloud cover which was meta data that was for whatever reason something we didn't share (no one asked for it), so the quality of the signal depended on the geography. Ie sunny places had more signal - there was even a short window back in 2016 before credit card data was more heavily used, that you could predict the earnings results of retail chains in socal pretty well with our data. To your article's point, I believe my company ended up trying to switch to a platform that allowed people to create their own insights, but im not sure how successful that was in the end
• aaron695 4y ago
• vonwoodson 4y ago
  Panopticon. I want worldwide 24/7 live video footage. I want with enough resolution to identify letters on a printed page on the ground. And, I don’t want it to cost the entire global GDP to make and operate. Get cracking.
  • campchase 4y ago
    Sorry to break it to you but you already have access to this. It’s called MODIS, and it’s free ;)
    • vonwoodson 4y ago
      One frame per 24-48 hours is unacceptable. I said I want world-wide 24/7 120hz video, not “in the footprint sometimes by chance” 10km^2 at-a-time imagery.
• csteubs 4y ago
  Underpinning much of this is the costs associated with image capture and the lack of fine-grain temporal resolution. You can write software to analyze and pinpoint certain "things" the customer is looking for, but in all cases that analysis is a snapshot of a moment in time. Stringing along multiple snapshots helps paint a broader picture, but revisit rate is still a few times a day in the BEST case (and the customer likely has deep pockets if that's true). The bottleneck is image capture. The satellite industry is an incredibly high-walled garden. Launch costs are falling and the use of off-the-shelf hardware combined with smaller satellite forms is improving revisit, but it's a steep hill to climb no less. Custom-built monitoring algos are subject to diminishing returns based on a variety of factors and the number of images in a data set is certainly part of that.
  • campchase 4y ago
    Agreed. I’m biased, but keep an eye on synthetic aperture radar. The physics of those systems allow for monitoring with a pretty different theoretical limit on price-per-revisit from their optical companions: https://joemorrison.substack.com/p/why-im-leaving-azavea-to-join-umbra https://joemorrison.substack.com/p/why-im-leaving-azavea-to-...
• civilized 4y ago
  I'm reminded of the Simpsons episode where the government says they used satellites to look for the trillion dollar bill at Mr. Burns's mansion, but all it told them was it's not on the roof.
  • campchase 4y ago
    LOL I need to look that up
• jmpeax 4y ago
  Cool write-up. A 10 minute read + 1 minute deleting the annoying gifs from the DOM.
• Demiurge 4y ago
  It’s a little bit like saying “the photography industry still has no idea what customers want”. That’s the kind of thing open markets figure out. There are data providers of all kinds of data, and the data consumers need to find this data somehow.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • kpennell 4y ago
    It's so much cheaper to take photos on land vs. in space. Seems like that price difference and what people do with satellite photos vs. handheld camera photos makes them pretty different.
• rini17 4y ago
  Some year ago on HN was a satellite imagery company offering free trial. I was curious about the construction site of my house, whether I can discern where trenches were and such. But their interface stumped me, took time to figure a way to search the dataset by coordinates, then got some zip dataset download and then had again to figure out how to open images. Nothing on them was recognizable. If they really want new customers they should make this more accessible to laypeople.
• rmason 4y ago
  When I was an agronomist I used satellite imagery a lot for monitoring farm crops for our customers. Started in the early eighties going up in a Cessna laying on my belly where the passenger seat was sticking a 35mm camera out a repair port. But that got old and started researching satellite options. Problems was our company entire sales area was three West Michigan counties. All the companies wanted to sell me, I forget the term but say a tract (scene?), that was half the state. I didn't have a problem with the price per acre but wanted to buy by the section or 640 acres. It didn't make a lot of sense to buy the township but they wouldn't even sell me by the county. At the time probably 5% of my customers wanted this service and only wanted to buy just part of their acreage. I asked all these vendors why they couldn't sell me by the township. They routinely answered they'd lose money because they couldn't sell the rest of the tract. I said now you understand my problem, at a certain point you've got to break up a tract or give up on the market. Most of the company's ended up leaving ag. I eventually found a company that would sell by the section at a higher but still manageable price. Course then I discovered that in four flyovers a season the majority had clouds over the field and you couldn't see anything ;<(. Such is the pain of being an early user in any field. FYI The military has satellites using radar to see through the clouds, but in thirty years that tech hasn't made it to the commercial operators. The answer I think is automated drones that fly a circuit. The tech has been available for a few years but the government won't approve it for that use. In fact the FAA won't even let a Detroit company demonstrate they could successfully evade objects, they ran out of funding and shut their doors ;<(.
  • fnands 4y ago
    Things have changed a bit at least, but it's still very provider dependant. Planet at least will let you pay per pixel for their PlanetScope data (3m res) and with a daily revisit time you are guaranteed at least a few hits per month in the growing season.
• gorgoiler 4y ago
  Very interesting analysis. Imagery providers doing insights is like a bunch of record company execs starting their own rock band.
• chupchap 4y ago
  The companies mining iron, and those that convert the raw iron into specialist equipment are not the same. So why do we expect companies that capture satellite imagery to create solutions on top of it?
• AlexDoll 4y ago
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• AlexDoll 4y ago
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• AlexDoll 4y ago
  working in the agribusiness industry. I can tell you that satellite imagery solves many problems. But just satellite images won't help. You need to analyze and calculate various indices and indicators. I can say that the accuracy of analysis is high and it is definitely worth spending money on this software. Here I found some interesting information about high resolution imagery