Minds Behind Maps

Steve Coast is the Founder of OpenStreetMap, one of the most successful open source projects; started in 2004 and now used everywhere from Apple's Maps, Mapbox and even Pokemon Go recently. Steve has worked at places like Microsoft, TomTom, Telenav & Digital Globe. We talk about the future of mapping and Tech in general as well as how Steve thinks maps will disappear. Buckle up this is a long one,...

Muthu Kumar & Aleksander Buczkowski are the Editor-In-Chief & Managing Editor (and creators) of the Geoawesomeness website, which has been running as an independent geospatial media for the past 11 years. More about Muthu & Aleks: Muthu's Twitter Muthu's LinkedIn Aleks's Twitter Alek's LinkedIn And of course find more on the Geoawesomeness website ---  Episode Sponsor:  Element84 Dan Pilone’s appe...

Kevin Pomfret is a Space and Spatial Corporate and Transaction Attorney at Williams Mullen and one of the references in terms of Law around spatial data & within the geospatial community more globally.  --- Episode Sponsor:  Element84 Dan Pilone’s appearance on the podcast ---  About Kevin:  - LinkedIn - Twitter  - More about him Shownotes:  - Geospatial World's Ambassador of the Year  - CCPA: Cal...

Jeffrey Lewis is a Professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey and one of the most influential people in the Open Source Intelligence Community. He is also the host of the "Arms Control Wonk" podcast. ---  Episode Sponsor: Element84 Dan Pilone’s appearance on the podcast --- About Jeffrey: - Twitter - LinkedIn Shownotes: Dino Brugioni Seeing the Secrets Growing the L...

Jean Martin Bauer is the Country Director for the World Food Programme in Haiti, where his job is in simple terms to ensure the population does not run out of food. This conversation focuses on the use of data - specifically satellite imagery & maps - and how it helps feed the country. --- Episode Sponsor: Element84 Dan Pilone’s appearance on the podcast ---  About Jean-Martin:  - Twitter - Linked...

Indra Den Bakker is the CEO & Co-Founder of Overstory, a company providing vegetation information to electric utility companies about the state of (mostly) trees around power lines by using high resolution satellite imagery. This can lead to prevention of wildfires by finding hazardous vegetation before it falls on a line. ---  Episode Sponsor: Element84 Dan Pilone’s appearance on the podcast --- ...

Dr Catherine Nakalembe is an Associate Research Professor at University of Maryland and the Program Head of NASA Harvest Africa. We talk about some of her work on using satellite imagery for Food Security in her home country of Uganda & how she got into this field in the first place. --- Episode Sponsors: Element84 Dan Pilone’s appearance on the podcast --- About Catherine: Twitter LinkedIn Websit...

Emily Darling & Kim Fisher both work at the Wildlife Conservation Society, respectively as the Director of Coral Reef & as Spatial Analyst. They have developed MERMAID, a platform enabling coral reef scientists to aggregate & share their data together.  One of the main challenges they tackle being most measurements need to happen in the field as opposed to being able to leverage satellite imagery....

Arjen Vrielink is the Director & co-founder of Satelligence, dedicated to stopping deforestation by leveraging satellite imagery. They work directly with commodity companies who sell things like cacao or coffee to understand the causes of deforestation and how alternatives can be found. About Arjen: Twitter LinkedIn Satelligence --- Episode Sponsors: Radiant Earth Foundation : Apply for the 2022 R...

Barbara Ryan was instrumental in the policy change in 2008 that opened up the Landsat data to being freely & openly available for anyone to access. This resulted in more than 100x uptake in the number of imagery downloaded and fundamentally changed the Earth Observation industry. She is currently the Executive Director of the World Geospatial Industry Council --- Episode Sponsors: Radiant Earth Fo...

Jonathan Lacoste is an Investor at Space. VC, a Venture Capital firm he started in 2021 after having founded & sold Jebbit (a company focused on aggregating & analyzing user data online for businesses for advertising). We talk about how his experience at Jebbit translates to the Earth Observation industry, why he moved from founding to investing and the learning-in-public approach he's taking.  —...

Jeff Crusey is the Investment Director of Seraphim Space, an investing firm specialised in the space industry. They have invested in mulitple Earth Observation companies including Spire, Iceye, HawkEye 360 and Pixxel. This episode in many ways serves as an introduction to investing - specifically Venture Capital (VC in short) - applied to the world of Earth Observation: How funds are raised, how V...

A year ago, I started this podcast, not knowing where it would go. 18 interviews later, I'm more excited than ever to keep doing more of these, and get even better at it.   This episode is also on Youtube if you'd like to see the video too   Reach out and let me know who you'd like to see on the podcast! - On the website - On Twitter   Timestamps: 00:00 - Episode also on YouTube 00:18 - Introducti...

Jakub Dziwisz is the founder & CEO of Orbify, a company that is attempting to simplify the process of building Earth Observation solutions for any application.  — Episode Sponsors: Radiant Earth Foundation : Apply for the 2022 Radiant MLHub Impact Award for agriculture-related applications for Africa - with a $5,000 cash prize. Element84 Dan Pilone’s appearance on the podcast — About Jakub: Twitte...

Jacopo Margutti is a Data Scientist at 510, the Data branch of the Netherlands Red Cross which uses remote sensing, ground measured data and insights from social media to understand & react to humanitarian crisis. During this conversation, we touch on the the work the Red Cross does around impact forecasting of typhoons, how they have helped covid vaccine distribution, but also how to work on a ti...

Dan Pilone is the CEO and co-founder of Element84, a software engineering company focused on building geospatial solutions at scale. We touch on Dan's experience working on geospatial software engineer problems and how those have changed over the past decade. We discuss the work Element84 has done to contribute to AWS's Open Data program, as well the journey of co-founding a company with Dan's wif...

April Speight leads the Spatial Computing Cloud Advocacy team at Microsoft. This team focuses on helping developers understand technology & raise awareness, mostly with the Mixed Reality team, most famous for the HoloLens. We talk about April's work at Microsoft, but also about her journey from the the fashion industry, to entering the field of Tech in general. We touch on fashion and branding, an...

Dr Beth Tellman is the Chief Science Officer at Cloud2Street, a company focused on flood monitoring using mostly satellite imagery. They recently published their “Global Flood Database” - featured in Nature  - containing 15 years of data on 913 floods with human settlement maps across 169 countries. In this episode we talk about Beth’s journey to starting Cloud2Street, what being a scientists mean...

Keith Masback was CEO of the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation for over a decade and is now an Angel Investor and Advisor to multiple start-ups, mostly related to Earth Observation & Remote Sensing. Keith started in the US Army, working as an Infantry Officer, and went on to join the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. We talk about Keith's perspective both in the military and...

Tyler Erickson is a Developer Advocate at Google, more specifically working on Google Earth Engine - a platform providing access to many different Earth Observation datasets merged together - allowing users to focus more time on building their solutions. We talk about the importance of curiosity across fields to foster innovation, go behind the scenes of Google Earth Engine, and explore OpenET, an...

Dan Hammer co-founded & build the first few versions of Global Forest Watch, and is now working on Earthrise Media, a non-profit that brings data scientists, designers and storytellers together to tackle global environmental challenges. We talk about how Global Forest Watch was built, how journalists have leveraged the platform to tell stories and how it lived on until today. We also touch on the...

Charles Blanchet is the VP of Solutions at Iceye. Charles has over 20 years of experience building start ups, more recently in companies focused around data. Iceye owns a constellation of Synthetic Aperture Radar satellites, and is also working on providing flood monitoring insights derived from the images these satellites take. We talk SAR, how Charles joined Iceye, the importance of finding focu...

Chinmay Adhvaryu is the co-founder and CEO of Influunt, a company focused on providing insights around water damage using Earth Observation data. He previously founded, and then shut down Earthlab AI, a platform to aggregate, preprocess and analyze satellite imagery. We talk about both of these experiences, how Chinmay learned from the first one and from his previous experience in the world of Int...

Joe Morrison is the VP of Commercial Product at Umbra, who builds & operates Synthetic Aperture Radar satellites. He is determined to make satellite imagery more accessible, and has shared many of his thoughts about the Earth Observation industry on this blog "A Closer Look with Joe Morrison". We talk about how buying satellite imagery is not a solved problem, how he builds a team and how Umbra is...

Welcome back to another episode of Minds behind Maps! In this episode I sit down with Bruno Sánchez-Andrade Nuño, the Program Director of the Planetary Computer at Microsoft as well as the author of "Impact Science: The science of getting to radical social and environmental breakthroughs".   About Bruno: Twitter: https://twitter.com/brunosan LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nasonurb/ Website:...