DigitalGlobe Expands Partnership with Orbital Insight

This image depicts how Orbital Insight is detecting building shadows in Nanjing, China, to monitor construction rates in the area.

DigitalGlobe has expanded its partnership and offering with Orbital Insight, a market intelligence and data science company that analyzes socioeconomic trends at global, regional and hyper-local scales.

Within DigitalGlobe’s Geospatial Big Data platform, Orbital Insight’s machine vision engineers, artificial intelligence experts and data scientists now have access to 400 terabytes of high-resolution imagery, an increase of nearly 80 times the data that was available for analysis under the previous partnership agreement.

The partnership is enabling Orbital Insight to more quickly validate its hypotheses and understand a variety of trends in the commercial and humanitarian markets. Having access to this volume of DigitalGlobe’s data allows the ability to visualize and analyze even larger areas of interest around the globe, allowing users to better understand the economic trends impacting industries and markets, according to DigitalGlobe.

“Orbital Insight’s customers — hedge funds, Fortune 500 companies, and global humanitarian organizations — will now be able to understand near real-time global economic trends with even greater precision and scale,” DigitalGlobe writes in a blog. “In one recent project, Orbital Insight leveraged DigitalGlobe imagery to process 4 trillion DigitalGlobe pixels in a 48-hour period, counting 700 million cars that yielded tradable insights into national shopping behavior for the company’s customers on Wall Street. This fall, Orbital Insight expects to release several new data analytics products, including worldwide monitoring of crude oil storage inventories and monitoring construction rates across the major cities in China, which are powered by DigitalGlobe’s image library and Geospatial Big Data platform.”

“This expanded partnership with DigitalGlobe accelerates the realization of Orbital Insight’s vision for a macroscope, a scientific instrument for helping human society to see itself in a new light,” said James Crawford, CEO of Orbital Insight. “The partnership enables us to more quickly validate our hypotheses and understand a variety of trends in the commercial and humanitarian markets. Having access to this volume of data gives us the ability to visualize and analyze even larger areas of interest around the globe, allowing us to better understand the economic trends that are impacting industries and markets.”

“The era of geospatial big data has arrived,” said  Shay Har-Noy, DigitalGlobe’s Senior Director for Geospatial Big Data. “DigitalGlobe’s platform provides the largest commercial library of current and historical satellite imagery available, integrated into a cost-effective environment where meaningful insight can be extracted from the data through algorithms built by companies like Orbital Insight.”

To learn more about DigitalGlobe’s Geospatial Big Data platform, visit developer.digitalglobe.com.