#68: The Importance of Open Source, Project vs Product, Boring Problems in Earth Observation and More - Element84

Today, I have two guests: Dan Pilone, co-founder of Element84 and Robert Cheetham, founder of Azavea, which Element84 recently acquired.

Both Element84 and Azavea are essentially service companies that focus on building solutions to solve important problems in the realm of processing, visualization, and analysis of geospatial data, with open-source software at their core. I will let you listen to Dan and Robert introduce their companies and what they do, but I think they are solving some very important but boring problems.

If you have listened to this podcast before or read my blogs, you know what I mean by boring problems - those that are underrated and underappreciated, but unless we find a way to solve them, there is very less likelihood for Earth observation to go mainstream. Think about creating a standard approach to ingest, process and search for geospatial data or a standard format to use for placing satellite imagery orders from different providers.

In this episode, we talk about the two companies and how they came to be, the difference between a project and when it turns into a product, the importance of open source and its financial sustainability and more.

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01:38: Intros

04:01: Element84 and Azavea - Overview

16:21: Differentiating between a project and a product 

24:56: The importance of open source - why?

31:13: The financial sustainability of open source

39:40: What is STAC and why is it important?

49:20: What more should we be doing in EO to make it mainstream?

55:35: Wrap-up