Point clouds still feel a little bit like magic to me. You walk through a room, a city, or even just your living room with a scanner or your phone, and you can recreate it afterwards. But on their own, point clouds aren’t actually that smart. So what would it mean for every single point…

Cloud-Native Geospatial for Small Teams: How the Utah Geological Survey Did It What happens when a small, technical team at a state agency decides to go cloud native? They don’t have terabytes of satellite imagery. They have lots of small datasets, lots of scientists and lots of people who just want to get at the…

We already have a map. Actually, we have lots of maps. So why did Overture build another one? My guest in this episode is Amy Rose, CTO of the Overture Maps Foundation, and she makes a pretty compelling case. Overture isn’t trying to replace OpenStreetMap — it sits downstream from it, and from hundreds of…

Republished Episode – I wanted to resurface this episode because positioning is everything, and it’s a great overview of how it works.   Right now you are being bathed in radio signals from about 35 satellites, each one 20,000 km away, and every one of them is weaker than the noise floor of the receiver…

Earlier this year I ran a small experiment called the Geospatial Launchpad — six weeks of working closely with a couple of people to help them push their geospatial projects forward. West was one of them. His project is Sentinel Bird (sentinelbird.com): an archive of every Sentinel-2 visit over the Gaza Strip since 2015, with…

In this episode I’m joined by Apurva Shah, co-founder and CEO of Duality AI, a company building virtual worlds — or “world models” for robots and physical AI systems. Apurva’s path here is an unusual one. He spent most of his career in animation, first at Pacific Data Images (which later became DreamWorks) and then…

My guest today is Tyler Reid, co-founder and CTO of Xona, a company building the first commercial satellite navigation system. We get into why Tyler and his team are moving satellites into low Earth orbit and what that unlocks. Stronger signals that can penetrate indoors, more resilient timing infrastructure, and better security against jamming and…