Google's process for these divestments is controversial. I know credible people who expressed a willingness to pay more than Planet, in cash, to management. They were turned away in preference of management's buddies.
I don't imagine this will hurt anyone during this administration. But down the road, these policies may bite out of those enacting them. Take care, with your own firms and when you're given questionable instructions, to treat your shareholders fairly.
> I know credible people who expressed a willingness to pay more than Planet, in cash, to management.
In this case, the the total value is the sale value + continued access to data (including data from Planet's other medium resolution satellites) after the sale via the contract. How certain are you that the cash offered was more valuable than the current deal?
FYI: I'm an outsider whose only source is the article
Can you disclose who those people are? I imagine that a credible promise of continued access to imagery would be a considerable factor here. Could your sources make such a promise?
I'm surprised that Google decided that microsat imaging market was a distraction. It seems very high potential and synergistic with Google's other space based endeavors.
Provided that they can still buy the data, they may decide that the differentiator isn't the proprietary data but the data analysis they put on top of it. In which case owning and acquiring the data is no longer crucial.
Plain-old satellite imagery is starting to become a cost race to the ground. Real sauce is in the analysis - for example look at Orbital Insight or Descartes labs.
Satellite imagery companies try to differentiate by higher resolution or alternative imagery formats like multi-spectral.
That's not necessarily a problem considering the depth of the pockets of those types of clients (landowners, logistics and insurance are other major markets)
The bigger issue for Google specifically is that those types of clients are best served with a lot of handholding, and not with the self-service, mass-consumption sales model Google prefers. Also it's not a market they're ever likely to dominate.
What kind of things are hedge funds using satellite imaging for that they would amount to being a big customer? I'm assuming maybe oil tanker/bulk carrier movements for the commodities market? Or maybe something in the agriculture markets?
With a bit of creativity it's surprising what can be gleaned from satellite imagery; Orbital Insight produced a report estimating tha China was developing strategic reserves of oil by measuring shadows of oil tanks which rise and fall with volume of oil stored
Agriculture, forestry, construction and mining sectors are particularly amenable to satellite analysis, provided you know where the assets to be monitored are.
But isn't that ALWAYS the example used for how near real-time satellite imagery could be used? As the world urbanizes, this will be less useful. If uber destroys car ownership, this won't be as useful. What are the other markets and use for even more frequent and rapid earth observation? Not sure anyone will pay for it?
There are other things that are just as / more useful. Ship and container activity at a given port, for example. Number of trucks entering / exiting said port. These can be very useful in the right hands, and are much less likely to be disrupted by Uber anytime soon.
Ocean imagery typically isn't downloaded, or if it is then at strikingly low resolution. This provides three times the bandwidth for land-based imagery, as the earth is covered by about 70% water.
Google acquired Skybox for $500M in 2014. Curious what changed so significantly in 2.5 years that a half a billion investment was no longer viable. Based on the terms of this deal, it appears they were only after the imaging data itself. I'm guessing Skybox's VC demanded an exit instead of a lucrative multi-year data contract?
They also spent $2B roughly to launch 5 additional TerraBella satellites. So $2.5B sunk into this and rumors on the street is went for a few hundred million. As a Google shareholder I'm fucking pissed.
Google only wanted data for analytics.
When Google acquired Skybox it threw out their whole business model over night. Now they are able to have data access as a service and not bother with all the maintenance. Alphabet really tries to avoid everything that isn't purely software.
But the change is real. Google has been gradually become more and more conventional. That probably was what Larry wanted in the move of creating Alphabet, after all.
"Before Apple’s Steve Jobs died in 2011, he told Google cofounder and CEO Larry Page that his company was trying to do too much. As Page later told the Financial Times, he replied, “If we just do the same things we did before and don’t do something new, it seems like a crime to me." Yet Page also acknowledged that Jobs was right in one sense: he could manage only so many things before too many would get lost in the shuffle."
I think the value in such a comment is placing it within a timeline of the person's life. It wouldn't make sense to relate a story from 1982 and mention it relative to Jobs' death, but discussing an event that occurred months prior seems appropriate. Imagine it in the same context as "prior to his second tenure with Apple".
I'm somewhat surprised to learn that Jobs and Page were on speaking terms, particularly towards the end of Jobs' life, given the animosity, at least publicly displayed, between Apple and Google.
I worked for Skybox [Google] in 2015 as a contactor. A very good set of people who, at the time, were still getting used to integrating into the Google machine. I imagine that the past few years have been and will be a continuous sea of change such as this.
Funny, so did I. Extremely talented team, and hands-down some of the nicest people I've ever worked with. From what I've heard of Planet, it seems like a solid cultural fit - excited to see what comes next.
That is great news for the Terra Bella employees that Planet decides to keep[1]. Anyone know where the rest are going? A friend of mine who was part of the Motorola Mobility acquisition noted that employees got a big boost in benefits/perks but their output and business had not changed. I wonder if that impacted this deal or if Ruth just didn't feel it was worth it. Nobody thinks twice about a press release that says "We decided to stop buying our imaging data from Planet" but they freak out if you say "we just laid off the entire Terra Bella team." So it gives them more flexibility to cut costs without the PR hit[2].
[1] "As part of this agreement, a number of Terra Bella employees will join Planet to continue their great work within our combined organization."
[2] Its cynical I know but given how important maps is to Google, and how important satellite imagery is to maps, this is not an easy move to explain as anything other than cutting out the cost of the employees.
Their maps imagery layer already shows the higher resolution data available from DigitalGlobe.
I wonder if they just decided that they had been beat into the space (DigitalGlobe has 5 satellites capturing higher resolution than Skybox 1 and 2. It also isn't obvious that the Skybox satellites can even cover the same area; DigitalGlobe crows about their daily acquisition rate, Skybox doesn't mention it).
Google also operates a very large fleet of aircraft to get higher resolution then what satellite can provide. Both in North America and Europe. DG is just the fill in.
"Today, we’ve published imagery of the Sendai region at even higher resolution, which we collected on Sunday and Monday."
Note the "we collected" and how it's called just imagery, instead of "satellite imagery" as in the previous paragraph. A thread with operational details:
That's a good point as well. It would be interesting if Apple or Microsoft bought out Planet and/or Digital Globe now and held their imaging data hostage. But I've always felt that maps was much more strategic to Google than any of its other businesses.
I agree, and it is the place where I expect Google to go next when they need to boost revenue. It would be pretty simple to add a "$1/month" charge to have more than say 2 or 3 turn by turn directions sessions in a month.
To be more precise, I expect Google is working up to a sort of "Google Prime" where they can bundle a bunch of things you get for free or pay a small fee for into a subscription service. Perhaps youtube red, maybe some extra storage space, maps, and some gizmos on gmail accounts. Anything to harvest a bit more money from the users as the revenue from search ads erodes.
Mapping tech has always fascinated me. Can anybody point me to resources to learn more about mapping, GIS, and other subjects relevant to the tech used in this industry? It's something I'd love to get involved with.
Pasting the text because the page is not friendly to JS-off browsing. There are a few satellite images if you click through to the article.
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Planet Labs is thrilled to announce that we have entered into an agreement with Google, wherein Planet will acquire the Terra Bella business including the SkySat constellation of satellites, and Google upon closing, will enter into a multi-year contract to purchase Earth-imaging data from Planet.
I can speak for everyone at Planet when I say that we’re incredibly excited about this opportunity. We’ve long admired what the team at Terra Bella has achieved and we think the SkySat constellation of 7 high resolution satellites is highly complementary to Planet’s existing medium resolution 60-satellite fleet. The former enable regular, rapidly updated snapshots of select areas of the globe at sub-meter resolution; the latter regular, global coverage at 3-5 meter resolution. The two systems under one roof will be truly unique and will enable valuable new capabilities.
Planet will distribute SkySat data through Planet’s suite of geospatial offerings. Planet’s global medium-resolution imagery has proven to be of great value in the commercial market, enabling us to exceed our revenue goals in 2016. With Terra Bella, Planet will diversify its available data and solutions and be able to serve new customers and markets.
As part of this agreement, a number of Terra Bella employees will join Planet to continue their great work within our combined organization. We’re honoured and pleased to welcome Terra Bella to the Planet family and look forward to working with the Google team.
“When we thought about a company that shares Terra Bella’s passion and strengths in high frequency satellite imaging, Planet was a natural home,” said Jen Fitzpatrick, VP of Product and Engineering, Google. “Terra Bella has accomplished a lot in the past two years—including the design and launch of five more satellites. We’re excited to see what’s ahead for Terra Bella, and look forward to being a long-term customer.”
“From the start, Planet and Terra Bella have shared similar visions and approached aerospace technology from a like-minded position, and while our on-orbit assets and data are different, together we bring unique and valuable capabilities to users,” said Terra Bella Co-Founder John Fenwick. “Planet and Terra Bella together enables the continuation of our mission and makes for an ever-stronger business.”
With this acquisition, rapid business growth, and the largest launches yet for both Terra Bella and Planet scheduled for this year, this will no doubt be Planet’s most impactful year yet!
The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including the receipt of regulatory approvals in the US.
- what is the impact to Spacenow, Orbital Insight or Descartes labs?
- how big is the market of geo image analysis? as some one mentioned, there isn't too many customers beyond hedge funds/governments for these kind of data.
They are growing beyond their original technology as they search for revenue. The Dove's got them started but it's clear they need to move onto real satellites to become meaningful as the Dove's are low resolution and low accuracy; and pretty much just creating a space-junk problem for future generations. This is why they bought BlackBridge and now TerraBella - to try to get a reasonable constellation to get them competitive to DG.
I don't think the doves are creating space junk. They're not high enough to maintain an orbit for more than a year (?) or so. Maybe a few years in the more odd orbits. They experience significant atmospheric drag, and are small enough to just burn up on reentry.
Planet always knew that the resolution on the doves would be low. The advantage of a fleet of low spatial resolution satellites is that you can get much better temporal resolution - imaging areas every month, week, or even every day has unique value, even if you don't image them at better than ~4 meters.
Here are a few examples:
It's easy to get an image of (say) Haiti right _after_ the earthquake - you know the disaster just happened. But it's really nice to have an image of Haiti right _before_ the earthquake so you know where the damage happened, so you want baseline imagery of every city in the world to better direct post-disaster relief efforts. The more up-to-date, the better.
It's good for identifying areas where illegal logging operations are happening _right now_ - Count the trees in at-risk areas on a daily basis to track illegal logging groups.
Or image every port on the planet to identify international shipping trends and monitor loading / unloading efficiencies.
Or image every soybean plantation in the world to check crop health. [insert crop type above for the ag industry you're interested in]
Or image every major glacier every day and correlate it with temperature data to gather more scientific data about climate change and sea level predictions.
All these are simultaneously achievable with a flock of >100 3U cubesats taking ~4m resolution imagery. They are not possible with a half dozen ~1M resolution conventional satellites... Maybe you could do one of the above things.
There's a lot of value there - the more conventional satellites add to it, for sure, but they're not going to totally replace it anytime soon.
Sorry, my post came off negative. A lot can be done with cubesats but the issue is size, weight, and power. Considering a high resolution satellite is the size of a school bus (the short version) it's hard to pack comparable tech into a cube-sat.
What they do get you is a cheap payload that maybe is "good enough" for certain applications. The issue is Planet is realizing they are not "good enough" for mapping applications.
I disagree, there are a lot of applications for cubesats. The problem is physical optics limits the payload capability in such a small package; good images require a good telescope with lenses and sufficient telescope length. Accuracy should be a solvable problem, many small avionics packages with GPS, star trackers, reaction wheels all integrated. Aren't they supposed to degrade in like 5 years out of orbit?
Not telescope length so much as diameter. The diffraction limit means that (to zeroth order) your resolution is basically[1]:
altitudewavelength/aperture = pixel size
Planet's cubesats are at ~500km and visible light is ~500nm, and cubesats are at most 10cm per unit, so resolution is just:
5e55e-7/1e-1= 2.5 (all in meters).
There are some games you can play with super high contrast to improve on that, but it's pretty close to a hard limit. So to improve, you need a larger cubesat platform, like perhaps a 12-unit cubesat for up to 20cm aperture (1.25m resolution) or even a 27-u cubesat for 30cm aperture, but at that point, you're talking about a custom cubesat launcher (although the 12u one isn't too bad), and you might as well just develop a different platform that isn't constrained so much by the cubesat standard.
Which makes the Terra Bella merger make sense.
The optimum size of a cheap, disposable (6-12 month lifespan until deorbit due to the extremely low altitude) mass constellation of tiny Earth observation satellites is probably a little bit larger than the cubesat platform. And if you're launching them often enough (and Planet is, since they make up a huge proportion of the total number of cubesats ever launched... I think the majority?), you can afford to develop your own standard.
ISS's ability to launch cubesats is something that's fairly easy to upgrade and has been upgraded in the past. And other launchers for larger satellites from ISS have been used. And, of course, the same thing applies to secondaries on other rockets or even dedicated launches.
(4kg/satellite)*(50 satellites) is only 200kg. You could increase that to 10kg per satellite for a larger platform and you're still at just half a ton, which is pretty small for a secondary payload still, with the potential for sub-meter resolution, so I definitely see an upgrade beyond the 3U cubesat in Planet's future.
[1] There's a factor of 1.22 in there for circular apertures for the usual definition of resolving power (i.e. overlapping of the minimum of the Airy's disc of one point source with the maximum of the other... this being a case where you're trying to resolve two bright sources from each other). But again, this is for bright sources and there's assumptions about contrast ratio when discussing resolving power, so generally speaking, I just use "1" instead of "1.22", since "1" is a little more conservative and relevant to more than just two bright sources next to each other with a dark background.
I don't imagine this will hurt anyone during this administration. But down the road, these policies may bite out of those enacting them. Take care, with your own firms and when you're given questionable instructions, to treat your shareholders fairly.