That's a tasking model. The satellites can't capture everything, so they get a list of specific regions to observe. In other words, you need to know ahead of time what area you want to observe and you'll tell a satellite to point itself towards that area.

Planet's dove constellation is a monitoring model. It's medium resolution (~4m - i.e. you can see a house clearly, but can't reliably see cars), but captures Earth's landmass on a daily basis (modulo cloud cover).

In a nutshell, they're different use cases. A tasking model doesn't help you if you need to know what changed in an arbitrary area a week ago. A monitoring model is less useful for something like a port, where you know you'll want to always image it.

BlackSky will also allow you to task ad-hoc; the plan is to have 60 sats in orbit by 2020 with a ~15 minute revisit to any place on earth.

http://spacenews.com/blacksky-global-says-its-poised-to-cove...

Using the SpyMeSat iOS app ( https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/spymesat/id691290387?mt=8 ) you can also get 1km² or 2km² for 10€/20€ already. They offer access to a lot of different sats, some have a resolution as high as 50cm.

I wonder how many people trade on this information already.

If you Google "hedge fund satellite data", you'll get loads of results, e.g:

> Every five minutes a satellite captures images of China’s biggest cities from space. Thousands of miles away in California, a computer looks at the shadows of the buildings in the images and draws a conclusion: China’s real estate boom is slowing.

> Traders at BlackRock, the money management giant, then use the data to help choose whether to buy or sell the stocks of Chinese developers.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/15/business/dealbook/the-nex...

With this in mind have people been gaming the system?

A building on its own is a liability, its only worth something if it has occupants (or property prices are rising)

China is hard, though, because it's cloudy very often. Having a fleet of satellites in orbit with a ~15 minute revisit rate will be game changing to making sure you find exactly what you're looking for on the day you're looking for it.

Not just for traders, but this is really important for combating fraud, waste, and abuse.

The World Bank, for example, makes lots of overseas investments in places where it might not be convenient to send representatives to check up on the progress of, say, a factory for which they have funded the construction. They'll receive monthly reports about the factory and how many people it's employing, and when they finally go check up on it, it's just a guard house and a pile of rubble.

Having a fleet of satellites that you can use to monitor your investments will definitely make it much harder to get away with stealing money through this type of fraud.

> The World Bank, for example, makes lots of overseas investments in places ...

Perhaps you meant the International Finance Corporation (IFC)?

The World Bank's mandate is primarily to give out loans to developing nations. The IFC is the arm of the World Bank Group that makes investments.

They already do - several years back I was at a supercomputing conference and one of the presenters was processing satellite data, counting cars in parking lots so traders could estimate revenue of certain large retailers. That was 6+ years ago... Imagine combining that with modern ML (not so much for the car counting but the revenue estimates based on that)