Thanks a lot.

Well, and my job is to make you successful, so thank you very, very much. Planet is keen to help and support countries shine a light on global events that include security and sustainability.

Exactly, right, exactly. And so, thank you and thank you in advance for your help as the Digital Minister helping us to navigate this because it’s not always easy for us to find the right people or how to connect, or if you could help us be that interlocker we ...

So, I just want to emphasize that we like to build long-term relationships where it makes sense and we’ll listen to your needs as a customer but we share a lot in vision and philosophy that makes me feel very confident. I feel like there’s going to be ways in ...

So, we’d be delighted, obviously we have to look at the specific use cases of where we can help, but it’s actually really going to bring real value to you. I don’t want to pre-empt that but it strikes me that there’s going to be several areas and we want ...

Fantastic. Audrey, you’ve been so generous with your time. Thank you. And it was so really, really lovely for me to hear. I really think that your help in navigating this and the sustainability forward-leaning attitude that you have, presents an opportunity to collaborate that I’ve rarely seen in countries.

Okay.

That sounds fantastic. So can you help us provide a connection with them if they’re interested?

Anyway, so we’re open to ideas along those lines but it hasn’t been finalized.

So, the exact details, if you like, of how we provide this data is dependent. We do cost us real money to put satellites up, of course, so we have to cover those costs. What we have done in the past is make strategic partnerships like we did with Norway, ...

Well, to date we haven’t sorted out all those details. We just announced what we’re going to be building is the database underneath that, exactly how we’re going to provide access. What we have typically done with those sort of thing is made some available as a digital public good, ...

If Taiwan is interested in being involved with doing that at any scale, that is another area where we’d be delighted to have conversations. I know a lot of countries are thinking about this in advance of COP28 in UAE.

I think we’re on the very edge of being able to do that and we just launched in Washington, D.C, where we had our annual user conference where we announced that we’re doing a planetary carbon, what we call planetary variable which is literally a data feed, no imagery involved. ...

With our data we can actually get an individual tree carbon without going locally, and because of the canopy structure information that we get in our data. And so together with that and blockchain or smart contracts, we should be able to go straight from that Microsoft or Sweden to ...

Because we have, if you can imagine Microsoft or you know, Sweden wants to offset their carbon, but right now the only way to measure the carbon in the trees is through tape measures around tree trunks which is very accurate but not scalable. And the satellite data from Landsat ...

One final thing, one final idea on the sustainability side, we very briefly touched on it when you came to San Francisco. There is a fantastic potential now I think to enable carbon markets. I think we’re on the verge of enabling carbon markets at scale to offset, if you ...

So, we really balance this by being a public benefit corporation, this new form of corporation in California that’s possible, that enables to marry those things.

No, I mean in all seriousness, the value proposition of more recent imagery of the earth obviously, you know, crosses a huge number. We looked at the sustainable development goals and we think that we can have a measurement of 13 of those 17 sustainable development goals in significant ways. ...

The unique thing about the Planet is being so distributed.

We uplink and downlink with dual X-band from our 50 or so ground stations around the planet. And to Ben’s point, there’s an inherent resilience to our system by having 200 satellites. So, for example, Maxar, the biggest earth imaging company today has four satellites. And the difference between that ...

Yep, understood. Understood.

Yeah, I was only going to add that… Sorry there’s a time delay… It might be very helpful to have a connection at the right level, maybe in the head of the space agency to talk about this. I’m not aware of any formal discussions we’ve ever had with them, ...

Audrey, if… You go first, Ben.

I’m not aware of that. Do you know, Ben?

So, those are a couple of other areas. Do any of those sound relevant, interesting?

There is monitoring illegal deforestation. I can’t imagine that being a huge challenge in Taiwan but that’s something that we’ve done before. There is monitoring coastal waters and other sensitive ecosystems like parks, if they’re big for encroachment. I don’t know if that’s something of interest. And then we’re very ...

And other ideas, Audrey. I don’t know if this is of interest at all but sometimes, we put countries in all manner of other sustainability issues. For example, transitioning agriculture to sustainable agriculture so we can monitor the sustainable agriculture practices. We do this a lot in the EU. So, ...

I don’t know if we already work with any universities in the country. Ben, do you happen to know?

NASA actually provides our data to all the university researchers across the United States which has led to tremendous innovation. And something else we could also consider is whether or not there’s a way we can…

Well, that is very, very cool. I mean, that’s something that we can certainly support. We do support the NASA international apps challenge, Space Apps Challenge every year, but we could do some dedicated things. We can also look at what they’ve been doing and see if there are applications ...

Alright, cool.

Interesting. I think that’s interesting. Also, any other priorities from a sustainability side that we can also look at whilst we’re looking into things that may be relevant to you?

I do think we can pick up these fires and at least direct resources to the areas where this is happening commonly. I’m not aware of anyone else doing that, but maybe Ben, are you aware of any other country doing something like that?

I’m not aware of anyone doing exactly that use case. I can remember that we only pass over once per day, so we get a snapshot of all of Taiwan, you know, one about 10.30, 11. We can do it more frequent, but then you need to know where to ...

I see. And what about river pollution, is that an issue?

Did you say a pollution, an illegal pollution?

Audrey, do you have a little bit more time as well?

At least we got to meet you, thank you very, very much for your time.

Thank you. It is very, very nice to meet you. And I’m sorry that I was in a poor connection so you don’t get to see my face, but Audrey knows it’s not very pretty anyway, so…

What we have found works most well is when countries just lean into like, getting the whole area of interest and then letting everyone in their system have access to that, then they find lots of use cases that they didn’t even know that they would wanted to when they ...

My only comment to our approach would be… People traditionally buy satellite data by thinking about tasks to specific known locations. The big advantage of our system is because we cover every square meter on the whole Earth every day. So, things have changed dramatically because of the cost of ...

Oh yes, I thought you were asking Herming… No, no, absolutely. Ben leads a whole region of Asia Pacific. He’s based in Australia. We also have a team of people in Singapore who can come and visit very easily from there.

Is this to us or to…

But what were you going to ask, Audrey?

No, no.

We are also working to improve that substantively. Our next fleet that is launching, the first demo satellite that is going up later this year will have 30-minute latency. So, from when you say I want a picture of this location… I want a picture of Hong Kong. It will ...

That’s a great question. We have about 200 satellites, it’s the largest Earth imaging fleet by about a factor of 10. We produce almost 100 times more imagery than any other Earth imaging company. We get the data back within a few hours typically: the lowest is about 2 or ...

I was in a room that I think I had unbeknownst to me, it was a bit of a Faraday cage… [laughter]… but hopefully this makes it a bit better.

Yeah, happy to do that. And is this better from a connection standpoint?

I gotta change location but…