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…
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Where does one field end and the next one begin? It sounds trivial right up until you try to answer it. In this episode, I’m joined by Hannah Kerner — Assistant Professor at Arizona State University, AI Lead for NASA Harvest and NASA Acres, and Research Advisor for Taylor Geospatial — to talk about Fields…
Read MoreIn 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…
Read MoreMy 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…
Read MoreVexcel isn’t a household name — but you’ve almost certainly used their data. This aerial imaging company flies low-elevation aircraft across roughly 45 countries, capturing imagery at 7.5cm resolution from five different angles (straight down plus four oblique views), building one of the richest geospatial datasets on Earth. In this episode, Daniel talks with Steve…
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What happens when you take cloud native geospatial out of the satellite-and-petabyte world and drop it into a small city with no budget and the world’s slowest internet connection? In this episode, Daniel talks with Nissim Lebovits, a city planner turned geospatial data scientist, about his nine months in Argentina building climate risk tools for…
Read MoreJeffrey Martin is the co-founder and CEO of Mosaic, a company building 360-degree camera systems designed specifically for mapping. He’s been obsessed with 360 imagery for over 20 years — he built one of the first websites combining panoramic images with a map back in 2005, before Google Street View existed, and he holds a…
Read MoreOpen source software runs a huge chunk of the geospatial world — but somebody still has to pay for it. In this episode I sit down with Marco Bernasocchi, creator of QField and CEO of OpenGIS.ch, to dig into the awkward question most open source projects avoid: how do you keep something free and open…
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Ian Schuler is the CEO of Development Seed — the team behind a lot of the open source tooling that quietly holds up the geospatial world. He’s been at the helm for over a decade, and in this conversation, we dig into what he calls the great retooling: the idea that cloud-native geospatial is about…
Read MoreWhat is Earth observation, really — and why, after fifty years of satellite imagery, is it still not “mainstream”? In this episode, I’m joined by Aravind Ravichandran, founder of TerraWatch, an independent research and advisory firm focused entirely on Earth observation. Aravind writes the TerraWatch newsletter, runs the EO Summit, and spends his time thinking…
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