[HN Gopher] The satellite imagery industry still has no idea wha...
___________________________________________________________________
The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers
want
Author : campchase
Score : 209 points
Date : 2022-04-18 17:56 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (joemorrison.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (joemorrison.substack.com)
| joeframbach wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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).
| mmaunder wrote:
| 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.
| victor22 wrote:
| I heard their new feets will be able to charge at a faster
| speed when sitting on a compatible pole wire.
| campchase wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| maxerickson wrote:
| 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
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| > 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-deliverie...
| inglor wrote:
| 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.
| campchase wrote:
| I agree-most of my observations here do not apply broadly
| beyond the satellite imagery. One of my favorite resources for
| learning how "data as a service" businesses work (when they
| work) is the "World of DaaS" podcast that Auren Hoffman hosts:
| https://www.safegraph.com/podcasts
| dmitriid wrote:
| I found his own Twitter mini-feed he linked more valuable than
| the article:
| https://twitter.com/mouthofmorrison/status/15153275070793482...
| mikestew wrote:
| _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.
| molticrystal wrote:
| >I can't tell you how many clicks
|
| I don't know your situation but it always seemed to be
| streamline for me to be:
|
| 0. Email with tracking number 123456789
|
| 1. https://www.fedex.com/fedextrack/?trknbr=123456789 into
| address bar
| bagels wrote:
| Just Google search the tracking number. Google will link to
| the status.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| I've no skin in the game but having dealt with tracking a
| single fedex today, i found it to be a remarkably ok
| experience. No login, though. Their 'notifications by email'
| section was pretty messed up.
| kccqzy wrote:
| You don't need to log in or even create an account at FedEx
| just to track deliveries. You just need the tracking number.
| It's the first thing you see when you go to the homepage of
| fedex.com
| tepitoperrito wrote:
| You do need to login to see information on individual box
| delivery statuses.
|
| Otherwise, you just get the "master tracking number"
| delivery estimate which seems to be based off of the first
| box delivery date, not the date all the boxes will have
| arrived.
|
| There's probably a good reason things are that way for
| delivery tracking (see chesterson's fence). But the rabbit
| hole doesn't end there! Reports generated from their own
| customer portal don't include per-box delivery dates. They
| all show the delivery date of the FIRST box. This is
| extremely frustrating when trying to make accurate models
| for forecasting, or even just lead time estimation.
|
| They do this to make it harder to compare their services to
| competitors like DHL (oodles better than FedEX - but there
| are risk management considerations and also capacity
| issues) and it ends up harming businesses trying to serve
| their own customers better. This is especially annoying
| since they have really granular data internally that go
| into even more detail than just delivery date on a per box
| level.
|
| Attached is a screenshot of a spreadsheet fed by some
| internal SQL database and macros that can spit out per box
| information including delay reason (weather, transit, act
| of God) and even number of hours late.
|
| https://ibb.co/k3sNxYz macro / control sheet
| https://ibb.co/Zzjw8TV selected column titles
|
| If anyone at FedEX is reading this please consider pushing
| the narrative that your business customers aren't the end
| of the line for the goods you move. If anyone who DOESN'T
| work at FedEX is reading this, I can email you a redacted
| copy of the spreadsheet I referenced above (just send it to
| tepitoperrito AT 420blaze DOT it).
| mikestew wrote:
| This is not news to me. But of the four or so commenters
| saying basically the same thing (you don't need to log in),
| it does not seem odd that the user experience sucks less if
| one does NOT establish at the beginning that one has an
| account for such things? What the hell is that whole
| "Manage Delivers" page for, then?
|
| But telling me I'm doing it wrong for using an advertised
| feature, yeah, that's less than useful.
| lupire wrote:
| Similarly, if you are not logged into Google, but have a
| cookie, and try to view a _public_ user-shared document,
| login wall. No cookie? Document just works.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Sounds like you're trying to use a delivery portal but didn't
| finish setting it up.
|
| I use the UPS version as I get alot of UPS packages. They
| typically email me once the shipment is picked up, typically
| before the sender does. They have a dashboard where you can
| see all inbound shipments as well. This requires registration
| and address validation, but not a UPS "account".
| dylan604 wrote:
| How many people receiving FedEx packages from online
| purchases actually have an account with FedEx to log into? In
| the words of Steve Jobs, "You're holding it wrong".
| altdataseller wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| 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.)
| delusional wrote:
| I think this might be a case of the "grind" mindset, where
| ones own time is also seen as an investment. Hence the
| investment lingo.
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| lol. Was I using investment lingo? How humiliating.
|
| I managed to put together an MVP of a service that would
| push notifications for stuff like "tell me when my
| favorite musicians/novelists/artists have new
| consumable," all the while thinking "if any of these
| people were smart they would have done this a decade
| ago." Of course Amazon started pushing out the book
| stuff, and Apple Music with music, just a few months
| after I got the back-end APIs working.
|
| uh, so yes... grind, I guess
| 0des wrote:
| its not the grind minset, thats reality. time has a cost.
| altdataseller wrote:
| Is this true for all datasets that financial institutions might
| want to buy or only satellite imagery?
| campchase wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| ARandumGuy wrote:
| 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.
| ska wrote:
| 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).
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| I found the animated gifs distracting, it took away from whatever
| you are trying to convey (for me).
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| https://www.cameronsworld.net
| WestCoastJustin wrote:
| Fan of https://zombo.com/ myself.
| campchase wrote:
| 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!
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| For me, its not so much the presence of animated gifs as much
| as I wanted to be able to scroll one off of the screen while
| I focused on the words. For me, the top 30% of the page had
| something moving no matter where I scrolled. I can appreciate
| style and levity but for me the busy screen was enough to
| drive me away. Looks my Reader mode would have blocked all of
| the images and should have just gone with that ;)
| campchase wrote:
| That's great feedback, I will avoid .gifs in my future blog
| posts. I can see how that would be distracting and an
| accessibility issue.
| vgel wrote:
| I appreciated the gifs, personally. Added some humor to
| the article. Maybe there's a way to have them not
| autoplay or something.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| Maybe just space them out more.
| bromuro wrote:
| Please, think about us living in poor countries with
| expensive and slow internet connections.
| campchase wrote:
| Thank you, I will do that in the future.
| woah wrote:
| https://makeagif.com/i/RLd9kS
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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!!!
| retrocryptid wrote:
| sure. but working in aeeospace is cool.
| countvonbalzac wrote:
| 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?
| RosanaAnaDana wrote:
| 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 you a full
| chain of custody of every assumption a given algorithm uses, it
| never will be. Any solution that isn't completely translucent
| isn't good enough.
|
| If they wanted to be crushing it, lower the cost/ barrier to
| entry on the pixels themselves. Get it out into peoples hands
| and use more open, easier to build on licenses. Let people
| actually use the data.
|
| I've been on the other side of 5 failed attempts to work with
| Planet at large, medium, non-profit and startup scale projects,
| as early as 2016 and as late as 2021. They just don't get it.
| If your data isn't easy to use, I wont. If your license is
| going to prevent me from building what I need to from that
| data, I wont use it.
| campchase wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Who are you to tell a company what they can sell. If they
| want to sell the raw data so people can do whatever they want
| with it, then sound reasonable. If they also want to sell
| data with some analysis already applied so that other people
| can buy that data because they don't have in-house for it and
| just want pretty pictures to put in the deck, then why not
| sell that too?
|
| You don't always have to order the biggie fries and drink,
| you can just order the standard meal.
| altdataseller wrote:
| You can do anything you want.
|
| The OPs point is that it won't be profitable/effective,
| that's all.
| [deleted]
| palata wrote:
| 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.
| campchase wrote:
| Also, full disclosure, I work for a satellite imagery
| provider (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 wrote:
| Do yall have any plan to do work in the vis/IR space?
| campchase wrote:
| No, but I'm close with Albedo who is pursuing the same
| strategy in vis and IR: https://albedo.com/
| RosanaAnaDana wrote:
| I'm in complete agreement with this point of view, with about
| 22 years experience in the remote sensing space, ~10 of that
| in private industry.
|
| And its not just Planet that is hung-up on this same failed
| business model. Its also Hexagon, and a myriad of other
| earth-observation providers. Some are so difficult to work
| with its literally cheaper to go buy an airplane and a wide
| format camera and roll your own.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _its not just Planet that is hung-up on this same failed
| business model_
|
| There's a new one like every picosecond." It's "delivery,
| but for dorm rooms" for space tech.
| randomluck040 wrote:
| I would love to know more about the possibilities of Remote
| Sensing in the private industry. I'm working in academia
| and have the feeling that I'm in an echo chamber all day
| every day and no insights at all. Any chance I can contact
| you or can you point me into a direction?
| RosanaAnaDana wrote:
| Sure, check my profile.
| countvonbalzac wrote:
| 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?
| frakkingcylons wrote:
| > Sell both applications and wholesale data at the same time
|
| Bloomberg comes to mind since they offer wholesale access to
| data in addition to all the terminal functions.
| campchase wrote:
| Interesting example! Planet sometimes describes themselves
| as "Bloomberg for Earth Observation" or something along
| those lines.
| _puk wrote:
| "Bloomberg for x.." strikes me as just the modern
| corporate version of "Uber for x..".
|
| I've heard so many founders try to describe their
| business as "Bloomberg for.." when trying to describe a
| mixed focus offering of products that I immediately hear
| alarm bells nowadays.
| mturmon wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| terrycrowley wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Thanks, Terry
| waynecochran wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| lokimedes wrote:
| 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.
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| Impossible to read because of distracting animations.
|
| The new title of this post is much better, thx - it's kind of
| tldr.
| campchase wrote:
| I agree, the new title is way better. To whoever changed it:
| thanks!
| nightpool wrote:
| 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
|
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| GlenTheMachine wrote:
| 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.
| campchase wrote:
| 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 whole dish. But you never want to consume it in isolation,
| that would be disgusting.
| GlenTheMachine wrote:
| That's a good point: often the data product isn't generated
| solely (or even mainly) from orbital imagery. Often it's
| provided mainly from data the end user already has, and for
| which orbital imagery serves either as a cueing system
| (providing candidate locations which the end user will
| verify) or a verification system (providing final
| verification of locations the end user has already cued).
|
| Certainly that's true with eg the petroleum industry, and big
| ag.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> 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 vague statements about times. That doesn't work.
| Normal customers, ie not intelligence agencies, don't want a
| drawn-out negotiation process. The first company that can
| provide a basic web interface for purchasing imagery quickly
| and piecemeal will win the market.
|
| Top of the list for small customers are probably high-end
| real estate agents. They want to monitor their neighborhoods
| for houses that are under delayed construction or
| backyards/pools that are being neglected (sure signs of
| someone ready to sell).
|
| Civil litigation attorneys: I want everything you have about
| this particular intersection. Cops: I want any images you
| have of this house between these dates. News agencies: There
| is a Russian ship on fire at X location. When can you get us
| an image? And a great many other small customers I cannot
| think of at the moment.
| enriquto wrote:
| > The problem with space imagery is that almost everyone who
| wants it has a niche use case
|
| But this is a good problem. It's like saying "the problem with
| motors is that everyone who uses them has a niche use case"
| (submarines, cars, airplanes, industrial machinery...). Or that
| "the problem with microscopy is that everyone who wants it has
| a niche use case". And indeed it does! Microscopes for
| biologists are different to those for chemists, engineers,
| medical doctors, physicists, etc.
|
| The concept of "space imagery" is extremely wide. It is natural
| that earth observation satellites become specialized. I
| wouldn't be surprised to see in the near future some "CH4" or
| "CO2" satellites that acquire light in a handful of extremely
| narrow particular bands on the short wave infrared spectrum
| that are useful only for observing plumes of these gases. Right
| now, people use hyperspectral imagers (which have a _dense_
| sampling of some parts of the spectrum) and throw away most of
| the image data.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _like saying "the problem with motors is that everyone who
| uses them has a niche use case" (submarines, cars, airplanes,
| industrial machinery...)_
|
| This is a good analogy. How many companies say "I'll build a
| sweet motor and then find a customer for it"? They don't.
| They build the motor for the application. (More often, they
| build something close to the final product.)
| murderfs wrote:
| That's only true in extremis: it's not even completely true
| of car/industrial motors! Companies like Cummins design
| motors that are used in all sorts of applications, e.g.
| https://www.cummins.com/engines/qst30
|
| When you look at smaller motors (e.g. DC motors in handheld
| consumer products), they're basically jellybean parts
| targeted towards the highly specific use case of making a
| shaft turn.
| Frost1x wrote:
| It's only a good problem when your niche customers have deep
| pockets to pay for their varied needs and high risk
| tolerance. Most variations can't be protyped out by some
| engineer on the weekends where they just spin out a startup
| with minimal risk to address the gap.
|
| The false assumption I deal with that drives me insane with
| so many individuals is that everyone thinks their specialized
| use case is a small variation on the major use case that
| already benefits from economies of scale. That often isn't
| the case and a significant R&D effort needs to go underway on
| just how one can leverage existing technology for their use
| case.
|
| There's very often at least one, if not many, mission
| critical functional requirements from existing tech that
| require significant effort to make the jump from the existing
| tech to the desired use case. And guess what, all the non-
| niche users don't want to pay for that, so you need to be
| prepared to pony up the capital, accept risk of failure, and
| be ready to take the plunge.
|
| I tell people with this mentality that they need to work in
| reverse, first understand the technology they think is close
| and find the problem sets that have the best match up and
| focus on those. These efforts can costs hundreds of thousands
| very easily if not millions to tens of millions if you just
| play it by ear that "...this thing is sorta like what we want
| so it can't possibly be that difficult to adapt." (Basically
| what I hear with technology management, many business people,
| and clients)
|
| Many people pretend software and tech are just Lego blocks
| and since it's virtual, there's no capital needed. Good luck,
| because the skills needed to deal with this tech isn't cheap
| and the complexity often isn't low meaning expensive and
| difficult to find labor for long periods of time, often with
| a fairly good chance of failure.
| GlenTheMachine wrote:
| Absolutely. And what you do in that case is to sell motors to
| people who want them. If they give you feedback on how to
| make better motors, take it and make better motors.
|
| What you don't do is presume that you know everything about
| how people want to use motors, and offer a subscription to a
| design service that does all of their engineering design for
| them, as a way to sell your motors.
| moralestapia wrote:
| The problem I have experienced first-hand is basically that
|
| >individual farms might want to look at relative growth rates
| of corn in their fields, or soil moisture levels, etc.
|
| a LOT of people want this, but they would never pay
| $x,xxx/month for that, ever.
| n8cpdx wrote:
| The imagery is often already captured, so if I want to give
| Maxar $250 I don't see why they wouldn't take it.
|
| Eos (iirc it's been a while) actually let me buy some
| imagery, but they would only give me pictures, not actual
| georeferenced rasters.
|
| The actual manipulation and use of the data, even for machine
| learning, is pretty straightforward these days with ArcGIS.
| So yes, I want pixels.
| hammock wrote:
| I see a similar thing in the consumer data industry. Everyone
| has their own niche case that they want to find (diaper buyers
| with 2-2.5 year olds, or Etsy merchants, or flavored whisky
| early adopters, or new movers in houses 20-40 years old, or
| whatever) and you end up building umpteen custom models with
| the raw data that instantly get outdated the moment you use
| them.
| campchase wrote:
| That's very interesting, I don't know anything about the
| consumer data industry.
| avip wrote:
| One company trying to address that is Up42, a subsidiary (hope
| that's the appropriate term) of Airbus, building some
| marketplace for SAT imaging analysis.
|
| Interested to hear Mr. glen's opinion about that approach.
| soniman wrote:
| You don't think the US military is providing for all of
| Ukraine's satellite intelligence needs?
| [deleted]
| lmc wrote:
| https://breakingdefense.com/2022/04/how-us-intel-worked-
| with...
| GlenTheMachine wrote:
| I think it's very, very unlikely. It would risk giving away
| information on the capabilities of US national security
| assets. Which is classified literally as highly as it is
| possible to classify. We don't even let the Five Eyes know
| that stuff, much less hand it to non-aligned militaries who
| we can't vet.
|
| Plus, it doesn't appear to be needed. The Russian military is
| proving to be god-awful at even basic field ops like
| camouflaging their vehicles.
| enriquto wrote:
| > It would risk giving away information on the capabilities
| of US national security assets.
|
| But the actual satellites can be seen with the naked eye,
| and their orbits are known. The resolution is a linear
| function of their height, so it can be easily inferred, or
| at least bounded, by that of a "hubble" at a much lower
| height. If they are really worried about this scalar piece
| of data, they can easily blur the images before
| transferring them to ukraine. Not that it makes a lot of
| difference to see a column of tanks at 30cm or at 15cm
| pixels.
| GlenTheMachine wrote:
| "The resolution is a linear function of their height..."
|
| Incorrect. Even in the consumer camera space, resolution
| is a function of distance, native sensor resolution, lens
| magnification, lens quality, shutter speed (because the
| target is moving), stability of the tripod, etc. Same
| thing is true of orbital imagery: your effective
| resolution is a function of your optics, your sensor, the
| ability of your attitude control system to hold a steady
| pointing vector, etc.
|
| Also, "capability" != "resolution". What frequency bands
| is that satellite imaging in? Visible, SWIR, LWIR,
| ultraviolet? What is the effective magnification of its
| optics? Is it an optical system at all, or is it an RF
| bird? Is it all of the above? Does it just take top down
| snapshots, or can it track moving targets? If the latter
| how fast can it track? Fast enough to keep up with a
| tank, or fast enough to keep up with a fighter plane? How
| many frames per pass can it take? How fast can it slew to
| get multiple objects in the same pass? Etc.
| nradov wrote:
| Too late. President Trump already publicly gave away
| information on the capabilities of US spy satellites in
| 2019.
|
| https://news.yahoo.com/trump-tweeted-classified-satellite-
| im...
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| "gave away" old tech that just confirmed what everyone
| assumed. Your article even states it's not our best and
| most of the security agencies cared more about the
| process of how he did it then the image itself.
| speed_spread wrote:
| I'd guess the US military would not share their own sat feeds
| for fear of revealing their capabilities, they certainly
| could share techniques to exploit commercial sats in an
| effective manner for military purposes.
| egberts1 wrote:
| 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.
| teamga wrote:
| Weather alerts?
| counters wrote:
| 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.
| lmc wrote:
| 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.
| pseudostem wrote:
| >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.
| campchase wrote:
| Author here - not an original insight, although it's cliched
| 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.
| charcircuit wrote:
| It's why they are called models and not just "how it works" or
| absolute truth.
| Frost1x wrote:
| I know several industries filled with questionable
| researchers who might disagree with you. For clarity, I agree
| with you for most all cases.
| bmelton wrote:
| 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
| faldore wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
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