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The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

joemorrison.substack.com

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Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#11

Post by inglor »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #7

> 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 hug…

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.

Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#12

Post by dmitriid »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #7

> 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 hug…

I found his own Twitter mini-feed he linked more valuable than the article: https://twitter.com/mouthofmorrison/status/15153275070793482...

Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#13

Post by mikestew »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #7

> 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 hug…

Fed Ex (quite surprising) have decided that freely providing delivery dates to consumers is too value to leave to third parties...

...or to leave to the shipping endpoint customer, either. I can't tell you how many clicks it takes to determine when a particular shipment will arrive at my door. Off the top of my head:

0. Email from vendor: "your package has shipped!"

1. Log in to the Fedex account.

2. One would think that post-login that it would take your straight away to the "Manage Your Deliveries" page, because what is the most common action taken by a residential customer post-login? (My guess is, they want to find out when their stuff is going t show up.) But alas, no. It just takes you to the main page, but now you're logged in.

3. Search for that deliveries page...what is it called? Oh, wait, here's a Track button. Nope, that's not the one you want. Go click some more.

4. Finally find the Manage Your Deliveries option in some buried menu. Click it. It won't take your directly to the shipment that you originally were looking for, but it's in the neighborhood.

5. Ah, the Manage Your Deliveries page, where I can find out when the package will arrive.

6. "A label has been created, but the shipment hasn't been dropped off yet, so we haven't the first fucking clue when your package will arrive. But be sure to come back tomorrow to do this whole exercise again!"

I'm almost to the point of preferring vendors that use DHL instead of FedEx. It's that bad.

Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#14

Post by altdataseller »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #7

> 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 hug…

“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?

Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#15

Post by terrycrowley »

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.

Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#16

Post by ARandumGuy »

altdataseller wrote: post #2

Is this true for all datasets that financial institutions might want to buy or only satellite imagery?

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.

Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#17

Post by bmelton »

pseudostem wrote: post #5

>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.

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

Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#18

Post by campchase »

pseudostem wrote: post #5

>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.

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.

Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#20

Post by theobeers »

altdataseller wrote: post #14
Eric_WVGG wrote: post #7

> 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 hug…

“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?

I think they were referring to their own startup ideas. (I was also momentarily confused because "downgrade" tends to be used in the context of investments.)
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