[cmroanirgo]

You mentioned agriculture as an avenue, but I'm already aware of farmers using drones for such tasks. Also importantly, it can be done on the farmers' timescale, rather than the last time a satellite was overhead.

They monitor all sorts of things, soil wetness, crop/weed growth, weed identification, cattle location (they used to use helicopters here in Oz for such things)...

[imoverclocked]

Just imagine if you could get that as a service where you just open your phone and check on progress as needed. Better yet, you might get notifications when changes are detected so you can spend more time elsewhere. There is no reason that a set of satellites couldn't cover a single spot of the Earth once/more per day.

Hopefully they have good ML talent on hand that can help sort through the imagery and provide some form of automatic analysis for their customers.

[caf]

The post specifically says that they're an imagery pure-play. That kind of ML automated analysis is something they envisage another business layering on top.

[enriquto]

> provide some form of automatic analysis for their customers.

These automatic analyses are much better when they integrate data from several satellites. This seems a job best done by focused third parties that choose the optimal combination of satellites. A single satellite company would be inevitably biased towards using preferrably their sensors, to a detriment of analysis quality.

[godelski]

You also want to know your neighbor's data which you can't easily fly a drone over. And not just for competition.