[philosophygeek]

I'm the CEO of Descartes Labs. It's indeed true that we've built a data refinery that ingests lots and lots of satellite data. The data refinery can be seen as a two-sided marketplace. On one side, we form partnerships with satellite and other geospatial data companies (in addition to open source data from NASA, ESA,and others) and pull in all of that data. On the other side, scientists can run computations over huge amounts of data from multiple datasets. For now, most of our business has been done on the scientist side. In principle, we could provide our infrastructure to satellite companies so they don't have to build out the software on their own. Most hardware companies suck at being software companies.

Amazon's offering is geared more towards ground stations, but they might move up the stack and start providing data refinery-type services on top of the ground station work.

Oh, our entire stack is built on Google Cloud Platform.

[choppaface]

Can you give an example of "refined" data versus what one might get through the AWS product? ... in order to demonstrate the sort of tech skills and effort that differentiate the two. I'm basically hoping for some symbol grounding for "data refinery".

Also, what's the TAM in your specific market vs the AWS product's market? How has the TAM changed in the past 5 years?

Lastly, I heard your head of engineering brews better beer than any of your competitors. Is that true? Can be provide samples?

[zeptomu]

Refined data probably means getting insights from the vast amount of aerial imagery (and related like SAR or elevation model) data that has become available in recent years. Having access to the data is one thing (e.g. Landsat and Sentinel provided by Google, Amazon and other parties), but processing it efficiently is still non-trivial.

Examples include Land-Cover-Mapping (mapping pixels to classes like forests, urban areas, water, etc.) which can then further be used to do crop monitoring or land-use monitoring.

I guess this is different than the product AWS is offering here, which is more about getting the data from/to the satellite, but not about processing (at least for now).

[brootstrap]

Yeah these are classic examples of 'providing business value'. Want to be an agricultural tech company? Ingest some satellite data and calculate NDVI, boom you now know machine learning, data science, and have created a great business product that helps save the world by making farmers better.

Satellite data imo sucks, especially aerial imagery. Too many damn clouds to get anything useful in real time haha!