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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

#141

Post by campchase »

sandworm101 wrote: post #107
campchase wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>> but any one algorithm only serves an extremely niche audience. Forget the algorithm. They need to fix their customer service, their sales process. Customers want pixels, but they need basic services: simple and a predictable price. I want to give a location (pix+radius, four corners or whatever) and a delivery schedule (once a week etc). But when I try to buy that stuff I get package deals, "ask for a quote", and…

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...

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

#142

Post by campchase »

derekbaker783 wrote: post #128
sandworm101 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> but any one algorithm only serves an extremely niche audience. Forget the algorithm. They need to fix their customer service, their sales process. Customers want pixels, but they need basic services: simple and a predictable price. I want to give a location (pix+radius, four corners or whatever) and a delivery schedule (once a week etc). But when I try to buy that stuff I get package deals, "ask for a quote", and…

(US) Municipal governments that deal with Real Property have similar interests: they use the imagery to help maintain assessment data.

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.

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

#145

Post by campchase »

altdataseller wrote: post #125
lokimedes wrote: post #90

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…

Isn’t that the Snowflake Data Marketplace, AWS Marketplace and to a lesser extent Quandl?

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-image...

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

#146

Post by campchase »

palata wrote: post #102
campchase wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 busin…

Where does a system like https://picterra.ch/ lie? They seem to provide a way to tune algorithms for your images. Are those "algorithms nobody want", or is that helping niche use-cases (by allowing customisation)? Disclaimer: never actually used their system, just saw presentations about it, which show how one can train an algorithm to count... stuff.

Terrific company and interesting technology. I see them as an application making it possible for non-technical people to automate basic workflows. I’m skeptical that’s a big audience but low code/no code solutions in other industries have enjoyed surprising success, so I look forward to being pleasantly surprised.

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

#147

Post by campchase »

countvonbalzac wrote: post #108
campchase wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 busin…

Thanks for the reply! I'm curious where you draw the line between derived data and a full application for something like modeling climate risk for insurance?

It’s blurry. Can you take an action based on information presented to you from within the software? Probably a sign it’s an application at that point and not just a data feed.

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

#148

Post by campchase »

RosanaAnaDana wrote: post #52
countvonbalzac wrote: post #23

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 ri…

I can get not how this might get lost if you are looking at it from outside the industry. Realistically, Planet should be in the business of selling pixels in mass. However, Planet has decided that isn't enough for them, they want more of the value add. This is built into their licencing/ ToS. However, their black box analytic solutions simply aren't good enough. They never have been and if they arent willing to give…

I’m sorry to hear that. Planet is a company I admire quite deeply. I think they are well aware of the difficulties folks like you have had working with them in the past and I’ve seen firsthand the lengths they’ve gone to remedy that once made aware. Their new product organization is very focused on taking things in a new direction that I have high hopes for.

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

#149

Post by campchase »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #113
countvonbalzac wrote: post #23

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 ri…

Having worked in the sensing analysis market for a long time, I would frame the recurring business problem as follows, and it applies to sensing data generally, not just satellite imagery: There is a large market gap between the sensor platform providers and the would-be end users of that sensor data. Business is constrained by the fact that the end users are not capable of consuming what is being produced and neithe…

I think this is a fair summary. Don’t sleep on GEE, Orbital Insight, and Descartes Labs, though. All three have incredibly impressive platforms that can spin up new custom models and deploy them at scale very quickly. And Microsoft is starting to make a major push into the space with their Planetary Computer initiative. Early innings yet, though, I agree about that.

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

#150

Post by campchase »

csteubs wrote: post #130

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…

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-...
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