Through Siwei Worldview, our joint venture partner in China, we have recently established several new relationships, and strengthened existing relationships, throughout China, reinforcing the value we can provide to customers looking for high volume and high quality imagery products.
Most recently, Siwei WorldView secured a new agreement to provide more than 8.7 million square kilometers of imagery, covering more than 90 percent of China’s landmass, to a prominent organization in the country. The imagery will support the organization’s ongoing mission to create a nationwide basemap. Upon completion, the basemap will provide updated, high-quality geo-data resources.
Earlier this year, Siwei WorldView also secured new agreements with two prominent Chinese civil governments focused on management of land resources. Under one agreement, Siwei WorldView will provide 57,000 square kilometers of archived imagery, helping form the base layer of a high-resolution digital map of the entire rural area of the respective province; under the other, Siwei WorldView will provide imagery of China’s most densely populated urban areas in more than 15 provinces.
Late last year, Siwei WorldView also fostered a new multi-year relationship with one of the country’s largest providers of location based services (LBS), digital mapping content and navigation solutions. Under this contract, Siwei WorldView will provide the company with archived imagery for a total of 350 cities in China.
These new relationships add to Siwei WorldView’s previously announced contracts with China’s three largest internet portals, which use DigitalGlobe’s imagery extensively in their online mapping services.
We’re looking forward to continuing our longstanding and newly established relationships with customers throughout China and growing Siwei Worldview to further benefit the Chinese market.
We are pleased to officially announce that we have acquired crowdsourced intelligence pioneer Tomnod (www.tomnod.com.) While the transaction is not material to our financials, it does support our vision of being the indispensable source of information about our changing planet.
Tomnod has been at the forefront of innovation in the growing field of crowdsourcing of earth observation imagery analysis, combining their unique and novel algorithms with deep GIS and imagery knowledge.
We will continue offering Tomnod’s rapid information capture and validation services directly to customers. In addition, information gained by the service will increasingly act as a key data source for our in-house analytics teams, enabling them to provide more accurate insight and analysis to our customers faster.
Dr. Walter Scott, our Executive Vice President, Chief Technical Officer and Founder, said it best, describing the acquisition as “a valuable one for DigitalGlobe that takes us a significant step forward in achieving our long-term vision while immediately increasing our ability to help users across our industry save time, resources and lives.”
The Tomnod team now has a new home at our headquarters in Longmont, Colorado. We believe that this is only the beginning of the potential for crowdsourced insight with exciting times ahead.
Stay tuned to this blog for future updates, and note that we will be conducting a live Twitter interview with former Tomnod CEO and co-founder Shay Har-Noy starting at 4:00 p.m. ET today. Click below for more information on the interview!
DigitalGlobe is hosting its first Twitter chat while attending the 29th National Space Symposium. This first #DGchat will feature Tomnod’s Shay Har-Noy as we discuss analytics and the future of the commercial satellite industry.
Join the Twitter chat on April 8, 4 P.M EDT, by asking questions and contributing to the dialogue about analytics, GIS and the commercial satellite industry using the designated hashtag #DGchat to track and participate in the conversation. By adding #DGchat to the end of each tweet, you signify your involvement in the conversation. To easily follow the chat, log in to Twitter via TweetChat and enter #DGchat in the hashtag to follow field. It will then automatically show the chat taking place and add the hashtag to each tweet you post.
Not available for the chat? Tweet your questions to @DigitalGlobe in advance, using the hashtag #DGchat. If you aren’t on Twitter, but are interested in asking a question, feel free to post questions on the DigitalGlobe Facebook page or send questions in an e-mail to social@digitalglobe.com.
