Andrew Peterson is the Co-Founder & CEO of Array Labs, with a simple mission: Mapping the whole world in 3D, at 20cm in near real time. We peel the layers as to what it takes to get there: the engineering that’s required, how to build a constellation to do that, how you fund such a project. Sponsor: OpenCage Use OpenCage for your geocoding needs wi…

Jamie McMichael-Phillips is the Director of the Seabed 2030 Project, which aims to map all of the world's oceans, by 2030. For context, in 2024, we’re at 26.1%. This is conversation is about why, how we get to 100% and why it’s important in the first place. Sponsor: SatCamp SatCamp is a different kind of conference, from October 1st to October 3rd …

Check out Jed’s Techs on Text podcast Jed has also been on Minds Behind Maps before. We talked open data, AI, and the role of books for people building thingsBy Jed Sundwall

Jean-Martin Bauer has been working at the World Food Program for over 20years, and the author of the “The New Breadline”. Most recently he was the Country Director for Haiti, in charge of helping make sure the country doesn’t run out of food. Sponsor: SatCamp SatCamp is a different kind of conference, from October 1st to October 3rd 2024, in Boulde…

Ashlee Vance is a Tech Journalist, the author of Elon Musk's 1st biography in 2015, the host of "Hello World" on Youtube and the author of "When the Heavens Went on Sale" as well as the accompanying documentary "Wild Wild Space" following 4 New Space companies. We nerd out on rocket companies, 1 rogue NASA administrator, and the time I got to meet …

Luke Fischer is the Co-Founder & CEO of SkyFi, a company that we'll describe in a few ways in this episode, but boils down to an Earth Observation marketplace. We talk about Luke's 20 year time in the military before getting into startups, why Luke is bullish on their approach and many more Sponsor: SatCamp SatCamp is a different kind of conference…

Ben Strong is the Science & Machine Learning Lead at Earth Genome, an NGO working on the intersection of data, science & digital design. Most recently they've been working on Earth Index, an application built on top of Earth embeddings from foundation models. This conversation is the "so what" of Earth foundational model Sponsor: OpenCage Use OpenC…

Ib Green led the development of 3D visualisation tools like for example Uber’s deck.gl and is now working at Foursquare, after having started Unfolded, which Foursquare acquired. During this conversation we touch on how browser based visualisations are changing This episode is supported by all the people on Patreon Access Behind the Scenes and supp…

Bruno Sanchez is the Executive Director of the Clay Foundation, which just released their v1 of a “Foundational Model of Earth”. We talk about what that means, building open source & non profits and can’t help but draw parallels to the not-so-open anymore OpenAI. Previously Bruno was the Program Director of the Microsoft Planetary Computer Sponsor:…

Dr Fred Calef III has the unofficial title of "Keeper of Maps" at NASA JPL, he's the Lead Mapping Specialist for most of JPL's Mars Rover missions, most recently that being Perseverance & Curiosity. But to land -and navigate- a rover, one needs maps, and Fred makes them. Sponsor: Nimbo by Kermap Try out Kermap's monthly mosaic viewer Nimbo for your…

Sponsor: OpenCage Use OpenCage for your geocoding needs with their API Geomob Shownotes Note: Links to books are Amazon Affiliate links. I earn a small commission if you buy any of these books. GeoLayers geolayers.app Johnny Harris Markus’s cameo in a recent video Search Party Felt Procreate dreams Jason Boone’s episode Podcast recommendation: Synt…

Volodymyr Agafonkin is the creator of Leaflet, an open-source JS mapping library started in 2008 that is used pretty much everywhere on the Internet today. We end up nerding out on what makes building simple open source software & rendering maps online tricky but also so endlessly interesting. Volodymyr lives in Ukraine, a country shaken by a war f…

Qiusheng Wu is an Associate Professor in Geography, an active open source contributor behind projects like geemap, leafmap or segment-geospatial also sharing tutorials on his popular Youtube channel. Qiusheng has a desire to teach, share and lower the barrier to entry to geospatial, all things I'm always curious to talk more about Sponsor: OpenCage…

Ryan Abernathey is a Climate Scientist, open-source software developer and the CEO & co-founder of Earthmover, a company trying to simplify how scientific computing is done. Ryan also co-founded the Pangeo project in 2016, one of the major efforts to build better tools for scientific computing today. Sponsor: Nimbo by Kermap Try out Kermap's monthl…

Gilberto Camara was the director of INPE, Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research from 2005 to 2012, working there 35y in total and leading the use of satellite imagery to fight deforestation in Brazil, leading to what Nature declared “One of the biggest environmental wins of the 2000s” Sponsor: OpenCage Use OpenCage for your geocoding needs…

Thomas Ager worked for 30y at the National Geospatial Agency on Radar satellite images and recently released ‘The Essentials of SAR’ a book breaking down Synthetic Aperture Radar for, as he puts it, “non electrical engineers” Sponsor: Planet Find more about accessing Planet's high resolution & high frequency images About Tom LinkedIn His book: The …

Brian McClendon was one of the earliest investors & later VP of Engineering at Keyhole, which got acquired by Google in 2004. Brian become VP of Engineering and led Google Geo, overlooking the development of Google Earth & Google Maps. He also worked at Uber & is now at Niantic, which you might know for thri most popular app: Pokemon Go Sponsor: Op…

Ariel Seidman is one of the co-founders of Hivemapper, a company building a map through selling dashcams & paying contributing drivers with the aim of competing with Google Maps. Ariel has a long history of mapping, working on Map & Search at Yahoo in the mid 2000s. Sponsor: Planet Find more about accessing Planet's high resolution & high frequency…

It's the end of the year, so time for Christmas sweaters & looking back on the year through 12 conversations ranging from advice for people wanting to build things, discussing academia & companies, thinking about the roles of maps in the world and many others. Support the podcast & my work on Patreon Listen to the full episodes mentioned today: Har…

Jason Boone runs the Boone Loves Videos YouTube Channel with nearly 100k subscribers, teaching people visual effects & map animations. This led him to work with some of the biggest YouTubers out there, including Johnny Harris. We talked about running an online business teaching people map animations, using maps to tell stories and Jason's recent di…

Javier de la Torre started a Biologist Researcher, went on to start Vizzuality and later Carto where he is now. Javier works at the intersection mapping, software based companies & geospatial. He is also one of the founding members of the Tierra Pura Foundation focused on mitigation and adaptions tactics to climate change. Sponsor: Felt Check out t…

Hongwei Liu is the CEO & Co-Founder of MappedIn, a company focused on indoor mapping. I know a lot about what it takes to map the outdoor world, but little about what’s required to map indoors. That’s what this conversation is about. Episode Sponsor: SkyFi Get high resolution imagery easily, with prices up front on SkyFi.com About Hongwei LinkedIn …

Sean Gorman is currently on his 4th start-up, Zephr, working on improving smartphone location. Previously he worked on 3D mapping (acquired by Snap), mapping fibre optics infrastructure (and caught the NAS's attention as a grad student). I was recently in Colorado and got to spend a few days with Sean, at the end of which we recorded a conversation…

Harold Goddijn is one of the co-founders & the CEO of TomTom. TomTom has pivoted many times, from it's beginnings making PDA software in the early 90s, stumbling onto map applications, building its own hardware to millions of devices sold in a day, to its current form today. TomTom is a fascinating company in the mapping industry and I'm excited to…

James Killick worked at Apple from 2013 to 2022 on the Maps team and has worked in mapping for the past 40 years. I've been wondering why Apple has gotten so much into Maps; Google makes sense to me, they're just the same ad business as search, but on a map. So, why -and how- did Apple get into Map? Sponsor: Felt Try out collaborative online mappin…

Aravind Ravichandran is the founder of TerraWatch Space, where he does consulting and strategy with the goal, in his words, to demystify Earth Observation. This is an introduction to the 5 layers Aravind identifies as making the Earth Observation industry. Aravind writes one of the most popular newsletter gathering the latest news and featuring dee…

Steve Brumby is the founder & CTO of Impact Observatory, a company working on providing rapid land cover maps anywhere on Earth. He puts it as wanting to provide "the maps the US takes for granted, all around the globe". Steve was also a co-founder & the CTO at Descartes Labs and worked at National Geographic. --- Episode Sponsor: OpenCage Use Open…

Explore the impact of open source on academia and its transformation over time as Royal, General Manager of Digital Media and Games at the Linux Foundation, speaks to Stephen Jacobs, professor at RIT’s School of Interactive Games & Media and head of Open@RIT. Stephen recounts his longtime involvement in open source, sparked by a program to develop …

Robert Cheetham is the founder of Azavea, founded all the way back in 2000 and Dan Pilone one of the founders of Element84, started in 2010. Recently Element84 acquired Azavea to expand from large scale computing to also analysis. I wanted to talk to Robert & Dan about why they went for an acquisition and why now, if both companies had both been ar…

Dr Este Geraghty is the Chief Medical Officer at Esri, a former Deputy Director of the California Department of Public Health and a certified public health professional; so the perfect person to talk about how we map diseases, health and all the support around medical care. Este also wrote a book about the learning of mapping applied to covid, whic…

In this podcast episode, Royal O’Brien, General Manager of Digital Media and Games at the Linux Foundation, discusses gaming across AR, VR, and XR interfaces with Sidharth Moudgil from AWS. Sid is a Senior Graphics Engineer and has extensive experience in rendering for games. They discuss the complexity of graphics programming, challenges of render…

Can Duruk is the co-founder & CTO at Felt, a company working on bringing maps to the browser. In Can's own words they want to make maps fun and collaborative. Think of Felt as the Figma or Notion of Maps. Episode Sponsor: satellite-image-deep-learning newsletter To keep up with all things satellite images & deep learning, follow Robin Cole's newsle…

Today, I am speaking with Chiara Solimini, Space Downstream Market Officer at EUSPA, the agency that manages the space programme of the European Union. In this episode, we discuss what EUSPA is and its activities, the role of EUSPA in promoting the use of data from the Copernicus programme, the European Green Deal and how Copernicus enables its imp…

Today, I am speaking with Rhiannan Price, Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer at DevGlobal. DevGlobal is a consultancy that works in the development sector on impact projects with the world’s leading non-profits, companies, philanthropies, multilateral agencies, and government agencies. Rhiannan has been working in Earth observation for a while, es…

Zhuang-Fang Nana Yi is a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Regrow, though today's conversation is about her story from going to school not speaking the language, to mapping rubber tree plantations and ultimately using global satellite imagery methods to solve local problems. Support the podcast on Patreon --- Episode Sponsor: OpenCage Use OpenCag…

Today, I am speaking with Thijs van Leeuwen, Director of Product at Planet. Most of you should be aware of Planet, the company that operates the largest fleet of earth imaging satellites. A couple of years ago, Planet acquired VanderSat, a Dutch startup offering data products like soil moisture derived from various sources of satellite data. Today,…

Today, we are zooming out from Earth observation a little bit and going to focus on a subject that I think is very important for the future of EO: space sustainability. We are launching more Earth observation satellites than ever before, and the progress in space tech has meant that any individual, organisation or country can put up an instrument i…

Jed Sundwall is the Executive Director of Radiant Earth, and formerly worked on creating AWS's Open Data Registry, starting by putting Landsat images and then other Earth Observation datasets on the cloud. Radiant Earth is an NGO focused on making geospatial data more accessible, specifically for Machine Learning applications. Support the Podcast o…

Today, I am speaking with Dr Claire Burke, who is the Director of Science at Climate X, a UK-based startup that is building a global climate risk analytics platform to support organisations in their climate adaptation efforts. In this episode, we talk about what Climate X does, their tech stack and how they use satellite data, how they convert scie…

Today, I have two guests from Asterra, the Israeli startup offering a satellite-based solution for monitoring all kinds of infrastructure, whether it is for monitoring roads, rails, dams, water utilities and even for mining. While Asterra uses analytics derived from synthetic aperture radar (or SAR) imagery in their products, they use a specific ty…

Marc Prioleau is the newly appointed Executive Director to the Overture Maps Foundation (at the date this episode comes out). Overture was originally announced in December 2022, founded by Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and TomTom, with the goal of providing a open map data. That sounds a lot like what OpenStreetMap set out to achieve... so why start some…

Today, I am excited to bring you an episode on a topic that I have been researching for a while - satellite imagery in 3D. The guest I am speaking with is Josh Winer who is a Senior Director for Global Sales at Maxar Technologies. Maxar probably needs no introduction as a company, I think most of you know what Maxar does both within the Earth obser…

Today, I have two guests: Dan Pilone, co-founder of Element84 and Robert Cheetham, founder of Azavea, which Element84 recently acquired. Both Element84 and Azavea are essentially service companies that focus on building solutions to solve important problems in the realm of processing, visualization, and analysis of geospatial data, with open-source…

Grega Milčinski is the founder of Sinergise, the company behind Sentinel Hub & EO Browser which recently got acquired by Planet. While the deal of the acquisition isn't closed just yet at the time of publishing, we discuss the story behind Sinergise, how it's more of an engineering than remote sensing company and why they decided to get acquired. S…

Today, I am speaking with Pooja Mahapatra, who is the Global Lead of Geospatial for Climate at Fugro, a Netherlands-based company focused on geotechnical and surveying services for monitoring infrastructure. As you will hear from Pooja, geospatial data is central to Fugro's strategy and one of the fundamental technologies that power their products …

Mila Luleva is the Head of Remote Sensing at Rabobank, the 2nd biggest bank in the Netherlands. Specifically she works on the Acorn Initiative which aims at supporting small holder farmers transition to more sustainable agriculture practices by selling carbon credits for the biomass these farmers produce. Carbon credits are a messy, complicated and…

Today, I am speaking with Dr Benjamin Laken, who is the Chief Science Officer at Cervest, a UK-based startup building a climate intelligence platform to support climate adaptation efforts for enterprises, governments and non-profits. Climate risk is an important topic and satellite data has a lot to offer for estimating it. Whether it is the climat…

Renny Babiarz is a former Analyst at the NGA (National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency) and the VP of Analysis & Operations at AllSource Analysis, a company focused on providing geospatial Intelligence investigations. One of the angles of Renny's work is better understanding China's Nuclear testing using satellite imagery, Open Source Intelligence m…

Today, I am speaking with Grega Milčinski, CEO of Sinergise, a geospatial IT company based in Slovenia. Sinergise is most well-known for their flagship product, Sentinel Hub, which is a platform for accessing, processing and analysing Earth observation data. Grega has been around in the EO sector for a while now and has a ton of insight into the mo…

Today, I am speaking with Professor Paul Bates, Chairman and Co-founder of Fathom, a UK-based startup specialising in water risk intelligence. We have already had one episode on floods recently with Floodbase, a company that is working on creating near real-time flood maps, but in this episode with Paul, we discuss how flood risk is measured and mo…