WASHINGTON -- The age of transparency is here to stay and one of the industry leaders is making sure it has a business plan.
Because the remote-sensing industry is still in its nascent stage, the public doesn’t fully understand its range of commercial uses. "We have to convince people to use remote sensing instead of the medium they are using now," said Spot Image president, Gene Colabatistto at a Space Business Roundtable gathering Tuesday.
The way Colabatistto envisions it, the $1 billion industry will move from a quasi-space business to an IT-oriented business. "We need business partners who will give us exclusive access to market sectors," he said. "And we have to be Web accessible in all ways."
By the year 2003 at least 11 companies in five countries will have high-resolution, remote-sensing cameras in orbit that are of spy-satellite quality, according to an estimate by the Carnegie Endowment, a nonprofit think tank in Washington. These "eyes in the sky" will be able to produce pictures of objects on Earth as small as a few feet across. This so-called "1-meter (3.2-foot) resolution" technology once was available only to intelligence agencies through their own spy satellites.
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| The IKONOS image shows the downtown area around Mile High stadium in Denver, Colorado.
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| Space Imaging's IKONOS satellite captured this image of the Coliseum in Rome, Italy, from an orbit of more than 400 miles on October 9, 1999. IKONOS, the most powerful Earth-imaging satellite available to the public.
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| Situated on the south side of the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C. the Jefferson Memorial is shown here in the IKONOS' satellites first public image.
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| Jefferson Memorial as seen by Ikonos. Click to enlarge.
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In the near future, military and government uses of high-resolution imagery will be dwarfed by commercial uses. And before the industry explodes, Colabatistto hopes Spot Image will evolve from just selling the images to individual customers in exchange for a share in the marketplace to becoming a service company that provides the images on a subscription basis. "Right now with our engineers, we can build a great satellite," he said. "But we have to make sure we can sell those products and services."
"We have to convince people to use remote sensing instead of the medium they are using now."
The remote-sensing industry has many markets to target. One day, every police department, real-estate agent and truck driver will depend on this imagery instead of paper maps. Just as the internet was once the exclusive domain of the federal government, the industry is likely to undergo a sea change, drawing in a new range of users.
"We know that now we fit into a technical model but we have to figure out how we fit into a business model," Colabatistto said.
The market for satellite imagery is certain to grow, he said. And the pace of growth will be determined by the extent of government interference for national security reasons; the price of satellite imagery and the ability of satellite operators to market their products to new customers.
One company learned the power of marketing early.
On Tuesday, Raleigh-based Aerial Images -- in collaboration with Kodak, Digital Equipment Corp., Autometric Inc. and the Russian agency Sovinformsputnik -- posted images on their website of the super-secret Area 51, an Air Force test site that UFO buffs think is a repository of alien technology
The company released the images the day before to news organizations, including SPACE.com. Since then, Aerial’s website was overwhelmed with an estimated 3 million "page views," compared with the normal usage of 700,000 to 800,000 per day.
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