The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by ravenRegent » Wed, Apr 20, 2022, 4:28 AM UTC

campchase wrote: post #35

waynecochran wrote: post #30

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.

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 viol…

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.

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

#222

Post by achow » Wed, Apr 20, 2022, 5:09 AM UTC

nl wrote: post #174

achow wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parent commentator's contention.. Pixels are there anyway, and infinitely scalable - you can sell exact same pixels to infinite number of people. So why not to make a very easy UX to extract the pixels of your choice as per customized timeline. It almost sounds foolish not to do it.

The issue is that Google Earth imagery is good enough for most manual processes, Open Source imagery is good enough for a lot of automatic processes and there are relatively few markets that are willing to pay for frequent (1 month+) updates.

I want to give a location (pix+radius, four corners or whatever) and a delivery schedule (once a week etc)

This is the requirement. The timeline could be once a week, once a month or once a .. - the point is not frequency but predictability. With Google Earth, Open Source, et al there is no predictability, that's why they are not answer for THIS potential customer.

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

#223

Post by moralestapia » Wed, Apr 20, 2022, 5:04 PM UTC

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #170

PeterisP wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are like 2 million farms in USA, and if that information is worth to them something like $10/month then that's a potential market worth quarter of a billion per year..

That's a poor assumption to base a business off of.

I kind of agree with you (what I think you mean with it) but variations of that statement appear in 95% of startup pitches.

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

#224

Post by jjeaff » Wed, Apr 20, 2022, 10:29 PM UTC

hyperman1 wrote: post #200

jjeaff wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not aware of any technology as of yet that can see activity through a thick and insulated roof from low earth orbit or even a few thousand feet up for that matter. But I could be wrong.

I remember seeing a (dead tree) newspaper article a few years ago about the police using sat images to detect potential cannabis plantages by the heat radiating from the building. Sorry, can't seem to find it on the net after a quick DDG

Yes, that would make sense because lots of grow lights can cause significant heat. I don't think heat technology could see individual people through a roof though.

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

#225

Post by singhrac » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 4:12 PM UTC

campchase wrote: post #153

noplsbecivil wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Very interesting, thank you for sharing that!

Having been on the other side of that... quant funds absolutely want raw data wherever possible, but I suspect for the application you're talking about there's some room for derived data; the responses for e.g. credit card data are relatively infrequent (earnings are reported 1/quarter) so using high-dimensional, high frequency data can be more trouble than it's worth. Genscape is a good example of a company with derived data that everyone in the industry subscribes to.