csteubs

I understand where you're coming from, but it's much more nuanced than plainly-stated "privacy intromission". For all the good that has come from tools like Google Maps, there's an opportunity to extend that good. For all the nefarious uses, it's an opportunity to pioneer techniques to mitigate those externalities in a way Google and other map data providers have not or will not.

The world is constantly changing and we need better, faster, and cheaper methods of measuring those changes. We can respect (and actively lobby for) privacy while obtaining these results at the same time. Morality and technology should not run parallel to one another, they should both be woven into the products we use every day.

You're absolutely right, there are huge swaths of airspace that rarely see traffic. Imaging satellites have an inherent advantage when it comes to total coverage but proportionally, a small % of all images captured in an orbital period are of interest at that point in time. We look at our approach as an opposite, complementary offering that optimizes for revisit in well-established and predictable routes around population centers (and whatever else lies in between takeoff and landing).

Most airports are zoned industrial and located within or on the edge of cities and towns, so we can provide more frequent updates of areas that are of greater value to customers monitoring supply chains, construction/site development, estimating traffic flows, etc. High-revisit is equally important at cruising altitude over much of the country where demand for agricultural/environmental monitoring, crop yield data, etc. is of similar interest.

All this to say coverage is a known limitation, but based on those reasons I think (hope) we'll become the yin to satellite imagery's yang.

You're spot on, and that's something I think about daily. Satellite-based incumbents have an average revisit rate (assuming good weather) of roughly 2x/day, so hundreds or thousands of passes/day poses serious privacy and operational risk. We rely on guidance from EthicalGEO and other consumer privacy orgs when drafting standards, but the path to the type of hyper-revisit we're envisioning will need to be tread very cautiously.

I'm working on a startup trying to make that happen now. There's an immense amount of "free energy" in the form of 120k+ flights around the world every day with that # expected to increase in the future with air taxis, delivery drones, etc. Idea is to hitch a ride on these platforms and crowdsource (cloudsource?) as much aerial image data as possible to create a map that updates every few minutes. Planet Labs and Maxar are great and satellites aren't going anywhere, but we see a pretty big unfilled opportunity in the remote sensing market.

Apologies for the shameless plug--we're on IG @notasatellite if you're interested in seeing some examples :^)

I recently bought a fairly large fossilized raptor skull mounted on a base for my office. It never fails to get a comment when I have visitors and having a hands-on relic from millions of years ago (even if it's just a cast) is really cool. I suppose my answer would be "tasteful fossil decor". Type in "dinosaur skull" on eBay and see what pops up!

I have a second phone number through the Burner app that supports incoming and outgoing webhooks and integrates with Slack, Dropbox, Google, etc.

$35/year is a pittance for the flexibility you get with a second number, the extra functionality is an added benefit.

I'm in the middle of drafting a patent in the map space right now and discovery has been one of the most fascinating parts, notably how many patents are laser-focused on UAV tech use cases in recent years. It's likewise been encouraging to see how many mapping patents have been granted to startups in the past few decades.

Awesome tool, Jason!

Not A Satellite Labs | Co-Founders (Marketing/Sales + Computer Vision) | Remote (U.S.) | https://notasatellite.com

We're building the world's first real-time map using a network of cameras aboard 60,000+ daily commercial flights. Our approach lets us gather thousands of times more data at a fraction of the operational cost of building, launching, and maintaining satellite constellations. Our competitors advertise daily revisit rates; we've demonstrated 1,500+ updates on a single coordinate in early tests using only cell phone cameras at an average resolution of 20cm.

I've been building the prototype and handling early-stage product market fit exercises as a solo founder, but now we're actively raising with the help of an excellent advisory team. I'm looking to bring on co-founders who can help run the growth machine and assist me with development of the video ingestion engine in a GTM capacity. We currently have 248 customer commitments running on a negligible burn (~$100/month for feeler ads, ~$400/mo for cloud compute) and have begun the patent filing process.

If you'd like to hear more about the business concept, current challenges, the product roadmap, or just want to chat about GIS, shoot me an email (chris@notasatellite.com) or check us out @notasatellite.

Anecdotally, one of the silver linings is the barrier for startups operating in the airline industry has never been lower. Prior to Covid it was exceedingly difficult to get a sit-down with business development personnel at major airlines, but the situation is now largely reversed if you approach with a product/service that could even marginally increase revenue per seat mile.

They are, but that number represents U.S. flights only and is pretty grossly underestimated. Flight volume hasn't changed significantly, but the passenger volume is way down which is a good thing for our purposes. There were 64,523 flights on March 29th (around the peak of the initial wave of lockdowns), compared to 154,000 back in January of this year. I'm using a dumpster fire of a source (Forbes) for those numbers but they can be found here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/gabrielleigh/2020/03/30/the-num...

Even if global flights slowed to post-2001 levels, we'd still be capturing vastly more data than the ~300 or so commercial imaging satellites. Our margins are fairly wide in that sense.

Great points! We're incorporating aspects of all three workarounds. Ground sync is already possible (wifi isn't available on many regional short-hop flights so we eat the latency), and we're discussing dedicated bandwidth with in-flight wifi providers. We've been paying the $14.99 market rate for customers testing the MVP who receive free in-flight wifi for their efforts, so the resulting cost would be much cheaper. To your last point, we load the last-known tiles expected to be captured on the flight in order to take a visual diff in the air, and then send that diff back down to earth instead of the entire image. This results in a roughly 80% savings in data but requires more hardware.

Yes and no. Connectivity tests have been an important part of the early work so far but depending on the airline and route, we've consistently averaged 6Mbps upload pre-Covid which has been sufficient. Passenger volume is significantly down post-Covid and that upload number has been about 3x lately. Wifi coverage is ~100% over land and the North Atlantic, so reliability of service is a negligible issue. American Airlines has recently upgraded their in-flight wifi to Gogo's 2Ku systems and we've hit 15Mbps up on those flights, but as another commenter mentioned, the plan is to carve out dedicated bandwidth onboard the flight for better connectivity. A connection is only optional, as we save the recorded data and can upload once the flight lands using wifi on the ground (much cheaper, but with a few hours of latency between recording and becoming a map tile).

The value really depends on the use case, but having the image sent instantly enables finer temporal resolution. Not all flights will have working wifi so all the devices (including the app) can save the data and upload once the flight has landed.

The sensors are mounted internally to the window in order to avoid any sort of external retrofit work, tunnel testing, FAA approval, etc. The MVP is actually just an app that uses the phone's camera to the same effect. We're talking to a number of carriers and exploring all the other deployment options as well (including a frequent flyer revenue share program).

I'd argue another point; satellites are a major bottleneck to GIS as we're familiar with. With only ~300 or so commercial imaging satellites in orbit, current revisit rates are sufficient for most use cases. Maybe one or two images/day for X point depending on weather. Low earth orbit is getting crowded, fuel to raise and lower orbit is limited onboard, expensive maintenance cycles, etc.

I'm working on a startup trying to solve this problem now. The idea is to "crowdsource" aerial imagery using a network of camera arrays on 80,000 commercial flights/day. We stream the video feed back to earth using in-flight wifi and overlay the visual diff to create a map that shows minute-level changes. There are huge built-in cost savings that come with not having to develop, launch and maintain a satellite constellation, and with a vastly higher revisit rate (as high as 4,532/day in some areas). We're at notasatellite.com

Thanks! I can definitely elaborate on some of the strategy here. The cameras geo-tag the images at the edge and verify against the flight path using time stamps for accuracy. Resolution is a function of altitude (among other things), but tests have consistently demonstrated <1m resolution at common cruise (35,000ft) and <10cm below 4,000 AGL. Multi-spectral is planned, and the final the prototype is equipped with an IR dome among the other sensors in the array. The entire device is mounted internally on the window which sidesteps the need for FAA clearance or tunnel testing.

A web map that is updated in near-real time. I'm working on a launching a startup (notasatellite.com) that uses a network of cameras on 80,000+ commercial flights to build the most accurate map. Had the idea flying home one day and realized the image quality at 30,000ft is just about as good as a satellite at 300 miles. There are thousands of planes flying around interesting places every day, so 100x the revisit rate w/o needing to spend millions building, launching and maintaining satellites. Original use case was detecting port container volume over 5 minute periods on approach to PDX which proved the feasibility.

I've got ~250 customer commitments with letters of intent so far but need help with some of the ingestion pipeline work. If you have GIS experience in any capacity (as an analyst, developer, enthusiast, etc.) I'd love to chat.

I've been doing user interviews in the morning; it's been working quite well so far. I'm in CA and a lot of my customers are on the east coast (NYC), so waking up a little early to respond to emails, DMs, etc., has meant I ease into development around noon. I also made a Slack team for myself and users when I started the project, so if I'm in the middle of building a feature and on the fence about whether or not to build, I'll poll the Slack group for some quick feedback. IMO Slack is just low-touch enough to be background noise while code wrangling. There's been a lot of excellent use case comparison and unprompted feedback from that community as a result.

Would you consider adding a feature to clear past metrics from the charts on /updates? I signed up for the SUS 2018 course with a startup that looked very different from my current project, so my metrics these days look like a bunch of primary-colored snakes chasing some dots.

I was thinking credit score myself.

Weren't the origins of dark mode (not Amdek origins but mid-2000's) in all those browser extensions that displayed energy savings?

Interesting! Would your primary goal be detecting new or possible archaeological sites, change detection of known sites, or something else? Any particular areas in mind?

I'm actually working on something similar now, only the data is sourced from aerial images. I run a startup in this space and we were previously discarding a ton of data because of cloud cover, smog/fog, haze, etc. This is a great application for less useful data, among others (mostly meteorological).

That said, I wouldn't call any early stage startup an "authoritative" source despite my wanting to. Trustworthy for sure, though! Link to the beta is on my profile if you're interested.

Not a stupid question at all! If you place your phone near the top of the window and angle it down, you'll see an image that looks remarkably like a satellite image and in many cases, better. I didn't believe it could be done either when I first started. A few friends working in the GIS space saw the images and started requesting them on frequent flights I took, and that's about when the lightbulb went off.

There are still a ton of variables that affect image quality. Type of aircraft, weather conditions, altitude, camera, seat position (sitting forward of the wing is slightly more advantageous because the inference engine doesn't have to correct for the exhaust blur in the aft), angle of view, residual engine vibration/dampening, time of day, flap/aileron position, the list goes on. Part of the go-to-market strategy involves making sure the hardware product and the inference engine handles a number of those limitations. Neither satellite nor aerial imagery is perfect, but you have a vastly higher chance with ~80,000 flights/day vs. the 300 commercial imaging satellites in orbit, with automatic cost savings in the millions that we can pass on to our customers.

Not-so-subtle marketing pitch--you can see a bunch of real-life examples on our socials @notasatellite.

Some of my favorites from testing so far are:

- container volume in and out of ports (which are usually in industrial zones right next to airports)

- daily crop harvest rates from the midwest states

- a small undergrad research team in Oregon is analyzing the mist and water turbidity of Willamette Falls to determine flow rate and the impact to salmon runs

- estimating the amount of oil moving in and out of Cushing, Oklahoma by measuring the shadow cast on tanks over 3,500 times per day

- wildfire detection and monitoring on non-daylight flights

There are a bunch of other demos and use cases on our social accounts as well--we're @notasatellite on all the platforms.

I really appreciate this response; banally labeling this a "PR issue" was a bit callous and does nothing to address the underlying concerns or the consequences of leaving them unaddressed.

I'm more or less a team of one at the moment and the original instinct when I had the idea was along the lines of "If I'm having to address privacy concerns, I must be doing something right", implying some degree of public interest in the product. There's now quantifiable interest and the waitlist hasn't stopped growing. Comments like yours make me realize I need a rock-solid set of first principles before enlisting outside help. The eternal optimist sees infinite use cases and it's easy to discard the bad and the ugly ones for the good, but the ramifications you've listed will kill the product before it even truly starts.

I'd love to chat more about this side of product development and throw some questions your way if you've got some time to spare (chris@notasatellite.com), but thank you again for the thoughtful response and reading material.

We're taking a two-pronged approach as we launch and scale up.

Short term: camera resolution on the average cell phone is often better than an array onboard a satellite, so the MVP is a native app that window seat passengers use to record in-flight. Because we know the flight route before takeoff and GPS works in Airplane mode, we load in target coordinates and ping the user to begin recording when flying over a target coordinate. They receive free in-flight wifi for their effort, but we also use the wifi connection to stream the video feed. That gets us more exposure to the 77,000 daily flights across the U.S. each day (also boosts general awareness: "Why are you recording out the window?")

Long term: we're developing a hardware solution much more powerful than a cell phone camera with a 6-camera array and many more sensors, including an infrared dome for near-field cloud penetration and onboard preprocessor for compressing the stream before sending it back down to earth. The form factor is akin to a headphone case (I actually used a Bose headphone case for the prototype) and is mounted to the window within the cabin, mitigating the need for FAA (but not FCC) approval. There are some teaser images on our Instagram if you're curious - @notasatellite.

Both, but largely through marketing. It's hard to address concerns in the product if the mechanism to collect the data in question doesn't exist.

Our goal is to even the playing field when it comes to accessing spatial data and I feel that's adequately reflected in the core feature of our mapping software; whether you're a forensic analyst at Interpol or the neighbor kid looking up BMX trails, you'll always be looking at the most up-to-date map data. Paid customers receive features of course, but what appears on the map is the same regardless of whether or not you're paying.