Mini-satellites send high-definition views of Earth

[Chippiewill]

Imagine being able to monitor deforestation tree by tree - and act accordingly.

Or, as a farmer, remotely monitoring the health and yield of crops on a daily basis over huge swathes of land.

Perhaps as an aid agency, effortlessly estimating the flow of human traffic across borders over the course of a week.

And for business retail analysts, estimating the footfall of a retail chain by counting the sheer number of vehicles in its car parking lots across a region.

These are just some of the countless possibilities conceivable when our world is observed from on-high every day or week, rather than the years it can currently take to completely update our planet's imagery on services such as Google Earth.

Soon these possibilities will translate into reality, as a new image-focused space race is steadily gathering pace.

Rather than being conducted by nation-states or mega-corps, it is being played out by Silicon Valley tech start-ups doing what they do best - defying conventional thinking to disrupt an entire industry.

Their goal is to reveal an unprecedented understanding of activity conducted on Earth by taking and analysing pictures of our planet in its entirety.

The new building blocks of this revolution are tiny - a fleet of shoebox-sized "cubesats" - cheap, miniature satellites, developed over the past decade in universities to aid space research.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27408318

Just read this article and found it really interesting, however the video embedded in the article probably gives a better idea of what they're trying to do.

One of the really intriguing things I found about the second company was the video potential, they mentioned Google trying to acquire them and I can see why. In theory they can see precisely how much traffic an area has in real-time which has massive implications for services like Google Maps.