360 million Google Earth users can’t be wrong.

The satellite industry and the World Wide Web are intimately linked by compelling content. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are jockeying hard for a broader niche in the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) market because people just get an enormous kick out of watching each other from earth orbit.

Once again, content proves itself king. How GIS content will be acquired, used – and most of all monetized – were hot topics at a recent seminar sponsored by satellite consulting firm Aon Explorer and facilitated by the French American Chamber of Commerce.
Although the discussion at Hotel Sofitel, Redwood City, was open to any of 35 plus attendees, a four-way conversation between Aon Explorer’s Roselyne Cartheron, Google Earth’s Michael Jones, Yahoo’s Mike Lawless, and Microsoft Virtual Earth’s Tom Barclay generated most of the sparks.

Who would have guessed, for example, that advanced satellites boast image resolutions down to a half meter and that aerial photography does considerable better (2 - 3 cm)? Or, that a modest satellite image of your home from space might cost just $50 except that the smallest satellite image you can normally buy today is 11 kilometers square. The imperative to drive costs down by one order of magnitude or more became the common theme of the lively discussion between the webbies and the satelliteniks. The reason? Despite healthy budgets for acquiring satellite and aerial imagery, the Web giants have not yet found a good way to make money from the content. Google Earth, Microsoft Virtual Earth, and Yahoo Maps are primarily marketing expenditures to their parent companies.

Interest perked up considerably therefore when Jean-Jacques Favier of the French space agency CNES (Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales) told of a project to launch many relatively inexpensive satellites with what he described were the astrophysical version of webcams.

The 90 minute discussion was far too wide-ranging to summarize in a few hundred words. But the seminar’s defining moment might have been when Google’s Michael Jones noted that big as it is in the global psyche, supplying images to the web is still very much a niche compared to the satellite’s industry traditional clients: governments, military, and natural resource exploration.

by Jack Shandle