Archive of posts with tag 'Imagery'

Weekend Reading: Commercial Imagery, Proof Mechanisms, and Cinematic Universes

August 8, 2020 • #

🌏 The Commercial Satellite Imagery Business Model is Broken

My friend Joe Morrison’s latest is an extended rant on the commercial satellite imagery market, and a plea to that industry to rethink how they might improve their go-to-market approaches for selling to commercial businesses.

I can vouch for his account of what it’s like to work with a commercial provider first-hand. Their business models make it challenging to go direct-to-customer, even at fairly high price tags. Until they can lower the barrier to entry into the two- or three-figure territory for acquiring any imagery, I don’t see the market widening very much farther beyond the use cases commonly addressed today. It’s not just pricing, though; they need self-service, automated delivery mechanisms to get the scale economics working.

It’s still too niche of a business, to me, to be truly realized at SMB/mass market level. Perhaps the continued convergence of gaming tech, mapping, and imagery data will create new use cases and customers to ramp demand high enough to motivate some of what Joe is asking for.

📑 Proof of X

Julian Lehr’s latest essay addresses proof mechanisms in internet services. How proof points relate to signaling. When new social networks emerge they have to introduce new proof mechanisms to differentiate themselves from existing incumbents. These can either be novel proof-of-creative-work hurdles or completely new proof-of-x mechanisms.

Also check out his previous related article on Signaling as a Service.

🎥 Cinematic Universes Aren’t New; They’re the Oldest Stories on Earth

The entertainment industry’s fascination with fantasy, science fiction, and superhero properties is giving people what they’ve wanted for thousands of years: epic, interconnected stories like those of Greek, Norse, and eastern mythologies:

At the core of our current fascination with the MCU or the Star Wars Galaxy is a fascinating fact: they resemble the epic stories that dominated human culture for thousands of years. They tell stories that feature countless characters, each one serving a role as part of an vast story, authored by scores of unknown writers and slowly shaped by audiences, each of whom could explain - if not detail - the particulars of these universes.

I’m currently making my way through Stephen Fry’s Mythos, his retelling of Greek mythology. The parallels between ancient myth and modern fictional universes like Marvel and Star Wars are striking, especially when you get to read them in a contemporary style from an author like Fry.

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Imaging the Earth, Every Day →

July 28, 2019 • #

Most people don’t know how earth imaging satellites work. All they know is a camera is flying overhead snapping photos. This visualization gives you an animated picture of how Planet’s satellite constellation can cover the entire globe every day for a continuously-updated view of the Earth:

In four years, Planet has flown on 18 successful launches and deployed 293 satellites successfully into low Earth orbit. With more than 150 satellites currently in orbit, Planet has the largest constellation of Earth imaging satellites in history.

Amazing that we’ve got this kind of capability with microsatellite technology. Right now most of the sensors (the “Doves”) give 3m resolution, but this’ll just keep getting better.

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Weekend Reading: Real Time Analytics, Georeferencing, and Fulcrum Code

June 1, 2019 • #

📉 Whom the Gods Would Destroy, They First Give Real-time Analytics

I thought this was a great post on how unnecessary “real-time” analytics can be when misused. As the author points out, it’s almost never necessary to have data that current. With current software it’s possible to have infinite analytics on everything, and as a result it’s irresistable to many people to think of those metrics as essential for decision making.

This line of thinking is a trap. It’s important to divorce the concepts of operational metrics and product analytics. Confusing how we do things with how we decide which things to do is a fatal mistake.

🗺 Georeferencing Vermont’s Historic Aerial Imagery in QGIS

This is a great step-by-step guide to how to georeference data. I spent time years ago figuring this out but still never was able to do it very well. This guide is all you need to be able to georeference old maps.

🔺 Fulcrum Code Editor

We rebuilt the code editing environment in the Fulcrum App Designer, which is part of both the Data Events and Calculation Expression editing views. The team (led by Emily) did some great work on this using TypeScript and Microsoft’s Monaco project, with IntelliSense code completion. It’s a great addition for our many power users to write better automations on top of Fulcrum.

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Weekend Reading: Product Market Fit, Stripe's 5th Hub, and Downlink

May 11, 2019 • #

🦸🏽‍♂️ How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit

As pointed out in this piece from Rahul Vohra, founder of Superhuman, most indicators around product-market fit are lagging indicators. With his company he was looking for leading indicators so they could more accurately predict adoption and retention after launch. His approach is simple: polling your early users with a single question — “How would you feel if you could no longer use Superhuman?”

Too many example methods in the literature on product development orient around asking for user feedback in a positive direction — things like “how much do you like the product?”, “would you recommend to a friend?” Coming at it from the counterpoint of “what if you couldn’t use it” reverses this. It makes the user think about their own experience with the product, versus a disembodied imaginary user that might use it. It brought to mind a piece of the Paul Graham essay “Startup Ideas”, if you go with the wrong measures of product-market fit:

The danger of an idea like this is that when you run it by your friends with pets, they don’t say “I would never use this.” They say “Yeah, maybe I could see using something like that.” Even when the startup launches, it will sound plausible to a lot of people. They don’t want to use it themselves, at least not right now, but they could imagine other people wanting it. Sum that reaction across the entire population, and you have zero users.

🛤 Stripe’s Fifth Engineering Hub is Remote

Remote work is creeping up in adoption as companies become more culturally okay with the model, and as enabling technology makes it more effective. In the tech scene it’s common for companies to hire remote, to a point (as Benedict Evans joked: “we’re hiring to build a communications platform that makes distance irrelevant. Must be willing to relocate to San Francisco.”) It’s important for the movement for large and influential companies like Stripe to take this on as a core component of their operation. Companies like Zapier and Buffer are famously “100% remote” — a new concept that, if executed well, gives companies an advantage against to compete in markets they might never be able to otherwise.

🛰 Downlink

A neat Mac app that puts real-time satellite imagery on your desktop background. Every 20 minutes you can have the latest picture of the Earth.

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OpenAerialMap: Open Drone Imagery for Humanitarians →

February 18, 2019 • #

I wrote up a post for the Fulcrum blog on using OpenAerialMap with Fulcrum Community. As we invest more in building out our Community platform this year, I’m excited to do more with integrating OAM into our tools.

For response deployments using Fulcrum Community, you can also add OpenAerialMap datasets to your Fulcrum account as layers to use in the Fulcrum mobile app.

Using Fulcrum’s map layer feature, you can add OAM datasets using the “Tile XYZ” format. These layers also become available on the mobile app, so contributors on the ground doing damage assessment, for example, can have access to current, high-resolution data for reference. OAM also makes data available in WMTS, and integrates directly with the iD editor and JOSM OpenStreetMap editing tools to simplify tracing buildings, roads, and water bodies.

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Weekend Reading: CES 2019, Tips for Satellite Imagery, and Shortcuts Archive

January 19, 2019 • #

📱 CES 2019: A Show Report

This year’s excellent report from the show floor from Steven Sinofsky. It’s extensive and covers the products a-to-z, breaking down the trends by category. I’d also recommend the companion podcast conversation between Sinofsky and Benedict Evans.

🗺 Satellite Image Guide for Journalists and Media

A helpful guide with tips and factoids on satellite imagery. Includes a primer on the various sensor platforms, differences in resolution, color correction, infrared, and more. There are also a ton of reference links for data and other things.

📌 MacStories Shortcuts Archive

MacStories’ Federico Viticci is the undisputed king of Shortcuts on iOS. As I’ve spent more time with the iPad as a primary computing device, Shortcuts has become an essential way to create the automations that make repeated tasks easier.

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Weekend Reading: RoboSat, the State of Security, and the Equal Earth Map

January 12, 2019 • #

🛰 Buildings from Imagery with RoboSat

This excellent guide shows how to combine take imagery from OpenAerialMap and buildings from OpenStreetMap, and combine to train a model for automated feature extraction. It uses an open source tool from Mapbox called RoboSat combined to compare a GeoTIFF from OAM with a PBF extracts from OSM. Very cool to have a generalized tool for doing this with open data.

🔐 The State of Software Security in 2019

An excellent roundup (with tons of ancillary linked sources) on the state of various parts of computer security, from programming, to browsers, to social engineering.

🌍 The Equal Earth Map

From Tom Patterson, the Equal Earth map uses the equal earth projection to show countries with their true relative sizes. No more ginormous Russia or Africa-sized Greenland.

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Weekend Reading: Mastery Learning, Burundi’s Capital, and SRTM

December 29, 2018 • #

🎓 Mastery Learning and Creative Tasks

Khan Academy’s Andy Matuschak on tasks that require “depth of knowledge” versus those that have higher “transfer demand.” Both can be considered “difficult” in a sense, but teaching techniques to build knowledge need different approaches:

One big implication of mastery learning is that students should have as much opportunity to practice a skill as they’d like. Unlike a class that moves at a fixed pace, a struggling student should always be able to revisit prerequisites, read an alternative explanation, and try some new challenges. These systems usually consider a student to have finally “mastered” a skill when they can consistently answer related problems over an extended period of time.

🇧🇮 Burundi Moving its Capital

It’s not every day you see the map changing:

Burundi is moving its capital from the shores of Lake Tanganyika and deep into the nation’s central highlands.

Authorities announced they would change the political capital from Bujumbura to Gitega, which is located over 100 kilometers (62 miles) to the east.

🛰 SRTM Tile Grabber

This is an awesome tool from Derek Watkins. It makes downloading SRTM data dead simple.

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Earth's Wonders Like You've Never Seen Them →

November 7, 2018 • #

The team from Planet, maker of microsatellites for remote sensing, shared this set of images taken by their SkySat constellation. As this technology advances, it’s going be a phenomenal resource to make high-accuracy 3D models of cities and terrain.

I love browsing Google Earth and looking at massive elevation differentials and escarpments like Yosemite or like Auyán Tepui, the tabletop mountain best known for Angel Falls:

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OpenDroneMap

October 24, 2018 • #

Since I got the Mavic last year, I haven’t had many opportunities to do mapping with it. I’ve put together a few experimental flights to play with DroneDeploy and our Fulcrum extension, but outside of that I’ve mostly done photography and video stuff.

OpenDroneMap came on a scene a couple years ago as a toolkit for processing drone imagery. I’ve been following it loosely through the Twittersphere since. Most of my image processing has been done with DroneDeploy, since we’d been working with them on some integration between our platforms, but I was curious to take a look once I saw the progress on ODM. Specifically what caught my attention was WebODM, a web-based interface to the ODM processing backend — intriguing because it’d reduce friction in generating mosaics and point clouds with sensible defaults and a clean, simple map interface to browse resulting datasets.

The WebODM setup process was remarkably smooth, using Docker to stand-up the stack automatically. All the prerequisites you need are git, Python, and pip running to get started, which I already had. With only these three commands, I had the whole stack set up and ready to process:

git clone https://github.com/OpenDroneMap/WebODM --config core.autocrlf=input --depth 1
cd WebODM
./webodm.sh start

Pretty slick for such a complex web of dependencies under the hood, and a great web interface in front of it all.

Using a set of 94 images from a test flight over a job site in Manatee county, I experimented first with the defaults to see what it’d output on its own. I did have a bit of overlap on the images, maybe 40% or so (which you need to generate quality 3D). I had to up the RAM available to Docker and reboot everything to get it to process properly, I think because my image set is pushing 100 files.

That project with the default settings took about 30 minutes. It generates the mosaicked orthophoto (TIF, PNG, and even MBTiles), surface model, and point cloud. Here’s a short clip of what the results look like:

This is why open source is so interesting. The team behind the project has put together great documentation and resources to help users get it running on all platforms, including running everything on your own cloud server infrastructure with extended processing resources. I see OpenAerialMap integration was just added, so I’ll have to check that out next.

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Weekly Links: LiDAR, WannaCry, and OSM Imagery

May 18, 2017 • #

🗺 LiDAR Data for DC Available as an AWS Public Dataset

LiDAR point cloud data for Washington, DC, is available for anyone to use on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). This dataset, managed by the District of Columbia’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO), with the direction of OCTO’s Geographic Information System (GIS) program, contains tiled point cloud data for the entire District along with associated metadata.

This is a great move by the District to make high value open data available.

🖥 WannaCry and the Power of Business Models

Ben Thompson breaks down the blame game of the latest zero-day attack on Windows systems. This article makes a great case for the business model being to blame rather than Microsoft, their customers, the government, or someone else. a SaaS business model naturally aligns incentives for everyone:

I am, of course, describing Software-as-a-service, and that category’s emergence, along with cloud computing generally (both easier to secure and with massive incentives to be secure), is the single biggest reason to be optimistic that WannaCry is the dying gasp of a bad business model (although it will take a very long time to get out of all the sunk costs and assumptions that fully-depreciated assets are “free”). In the long run, there is little reason for the typical enterprise or government to run any software locally, or store any files on individual devices. Everything should be located in a cloud, both files and apps, accessed through a browser that is continually updated, and paid for with a subscription. This puts the incentives in all the right places: users are paying for security and utility simultaneously, and vendors are motivated to earn it.

🛰 DigitalGlobe Satellite Imagery Launch for OpenStreetMap

DG is opening up access to imagery for tracing in OpenStreetMap, giving the project a powerful new resource for more basemap data. Especially cool for HOTOSM projects:

Over the past few months, we have been working with several of our partners that share the common goal of improving OpenStreetMap. To that end, they have generously funded the launch of a global imagery service powered by DigitalGlobe Maps API. This will open more data and imagery to aid OSM editing. OSM contributors will see a new DigitalGlobe imagery source, in addition to imagery provided by our partners, Bing and Mapbox.

📷 Updating Google Maps with Deep Learning

If you’re in the mapping space, seeing any of this R&D that Google is doing is mind-boggling.

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Aerial imagery with the Mavic

April 24, 2017 • #

At work we’ve been building an integration between Fulcrum and DroneDeploy, a service for automating drone flight and data capture for aerial imagery. It’s compatible with the Mavic, so I gave it a shot with some test flights over my house.

The idea is simple: use DroneDeploy to draw on a map the area you want to survey from above, and their app handles building the flight plan, sending it to the drone, and flying the waypoints to take all the photos. You then take the pictures from the drone’s storage and upload to your DroneDeploy project for processing. It stitches them into a single mosaic and does a few other data processing functions to give you maps of NDVI plant health, elevation, and even a 3D model of the scene.

This data is from a 3 minute flight over my house at about 150 feet. The post-processed scene reports 0.75 acres at 0.6 in/pixel resolution. Only 13 stills required to create this image. It’s pretty impressive for a few minutes of setup and a few minutes of flying. In the full-res images you can actually see Elyse and I clearly standing in the backyard. She was a little spooked as it took off, but loved the landing!

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