Great idea! This is the first time I've heard of Infinite Flight, so I'll definitely reach out. We've actually spoken with the company responsible for turning Bing data into the 3D renderings in MS Flight Simulator. We think they're excited!
I'll assume you're referencing SkySat imagery, as that's the more direct comparison to our product!
Different is more of an over-arching theme, so I'll focus on how we're better and cheaper. We are better in the sense that our native resolution will be 25x finer than theirs - Planet SkySats have 50cm native GSD and our satellites will have 10cm native GSD. This is "better" in the sense that we're more resolute, but we do sacrifice coverage.
As far as cheaper goes, the commercial space industry has made a lot of progress in the past 10 years, and as a result, getting to space has gotten substantially cheaper. This may be slightly oversimplified, but we're hoping cheaper costs for us will transfer over to our users.
Absolutely! We're definitely admirers of the HOTOSM/OSM community and would love to contribute towards the mission. If you know of anyone within HOTOSM who would be interested in talking, please tell them to email [email protected]
Like a Jupyter notebook but for satellite imagery? I think a good number of people may have taken your idea and ran with it :)
Google Earth Engine, Astraea, Descartes Labs, and a whole host of other companies have demonstrated a ton of value in this space, so you're absolutely correct. There's definitely work to be done fusing in other data sources like AIS, but I think the foundation is set.
Let us know if you end up building it - we'd be more than happy to float you some test data!
I think wedn3sday hit some of the key use cases we're personally excited about!
Agriculture is an interesting use case we're also excited about! While it's one of the most obvious applications, adoption has been curbed through historically high minimum order sizes, where cost is an implicit factor. Some providers require up to a 250 sq. km minimum order area, which already prices out a lot of small time farmers. We're hoping to reduce our minimum order area to 1 sq. km. and help enable this semi-neglected portion of the market. One company we're excited about in this space is Enveritas, a company looking using geospatial data to push for sustainability within the global coffee industry.
That's just one I can think of from the top of my head!
Fantastic point! We're emphasizing the whip-out-your-credit-card-to-pay model as a departure from the existing industry sales cycle, but we don't expect this to be the only pricing mechanism customers would like.
On the AWS topic, we've similarly seen a good amount of reception around a credits-based system.
> Pay attention to pricing your product in a way that enables your customers to buy it!
You're absolutely correct and thank you for the feedback!
This is exactly what we want to enable! We're hoping to offer 1 sq. km. minimum order sizes (for tasking, archive will have no minimum) to help grow both the hobbyist and even commercial applications as best as we can.
Just curious: have you looked into third-party resellers? They typically have low minimum order sizes and are fairly reasonable, even with a smaller budget.
I would say that the industry is already trending towards more of a third-party reseller model with companies like Arlula, UP42, Astraea, and numerous others. While we do see the benefits of being able to offer multiple sources of satellite data (virtual constellations combining high-res, low-res, SAR, hyperspectral, etc.) we want to limit our attention to doing one thing extremely well: providing high-res visible imagery.
To your point of developing our own tech-stack for "table stakes" - we certainly hope so. Planet has done a lot of fantastic work here as far as developing robust imagery pipelines but stopped short of removing salespeople from the process. We're hoping to take their approach a step further and remove that manual (human) component from both the sales process and delivery pipelines.