They’re the luckiest people on Earth because they love data, and they can capture anywhere they want for free with our satellite. That’s leading to blossom of imagination because they don’t need to worry about sourcing data. They can get as much as they want.

That creates really unprecedent imagination and why I notice because I have data scientists in my company. Half of our engineers are data scientists. We build satellites but we also do a data analysis. Our data scientists are probably one of the luckiest in the world because they get free ...

From that experience, I now know that you need to involve people. When you involve people, no one great man can do a work of 1,000 people. That’s my belief ever since. That’s why I’m passionate about this open data approach because I just feel excited just thinking about it, ...

That experience taught me, and then we decided to start hosting a conference on climate change, and downward success. That led to carbon trading and all these beautiful things.

There was Internet but not many people were active on it. There was no social media, or very limited people were on social media. We realized that the impact we’re creating is not amplified, because it’s really not scalable unless you visualize it and unless you communicate it.

That was great, but we realized something, the efforts that we were doing was great. We were planting trees in Virginia, US. That was creating some impact, but then because back then there was not much Internet or very limited way to communicate.

Let me bring a context on why I’m so passionate on our work. I used to be an investment banker. Because we had the means and the resource, we decided to invest or rather invest in our future by planting trees.

First of all, if you embrace this idea…First of all, I want your feedback on this. If you feel this is a good thing for Taiwan, I want to get your opinion on how to push this forward. For us, it’s about getting the right resource because technically, we have ...

Taoyuan, I just took it because it’s so cool. Again, to operate this, it costs us roughly $2.8 million. I calculated. It’s a real number. It’s not rounded [laughs] because I calculated. This will allow us to provide free open data to the people of Taiwan per year and here ...

Same idea. Instead of, I mean, not instead of. Why don’t we keep monitoring them? In case something is going on, let’s say, potentially, there’s effect in the vegetation here, we can maybe do something about it, so there’s no landslide to cause some problem.

This is another beautiful area. Initially, we didn’t know that there was anything potentially harmful, but we noticed that, “Oh, this is a nuclear power plant.” We couldn’t believe it because it’s so beautiful. I would have wanted to at least go to the beach here.

I love the beach. I love nature. It’s so sad to see if anything is causing a destruction. I’m not saying it’s causing a destruction. I’m just saying that let’s try to work to not cause a destruction.

Because if one person is watching, maybe we miss it or one person may make a wrong decision. If we have 100 people watching, we can [laughs] have a better management of what’s going on with the plants.

If there are, let’s do something about it. Let’s expose this. I mean, expose is a strong word. Let’s make it clear. Let’s get the help from everybody to watch it by having this data available to everyone to see.

The other thing is, we noticed that there is a lot of power plans along your coasts. It’s necessary because you need energy, but then that’s also usually in a very beautiful place. My proposal is, why don’t we monitor all the power plants to make sure there’s no destruction ...

The other thing I’m thinking is the reservoir, maybe monitor the entire reservoir on a frequent basis. See what’s going on, making sure everything’s OK.

Urban setting is cool, like this, but I want to do meaningful stuff. Monitoring like forest trees for disaster management, or at least seeing the healthiness of it, could be interesting.

Just wanted to end by showing you some beautiful images taken by our satellite of our Taiwan. This is Taipei. Another image, as you can see, we like to take natural beauties because I think one of the advantage of our satellite data is obviously taking large area. Also, because ...

We don’t know the actual water level. Not easy, but at least by identifying the land and sea area coming up, we can see the changes. For example, not just here but the side is receding as well. Simply using the NDVI, by checking the vegetation, the water is negative ...

What we notice accidentally is that suddenly, last year and this year, same season, water is dropping significantly. Now, what this made me realize is that if you monitor the entire reservoir with satellite, maybe you can use a computer to help identify the changes in the water level.

The other thing that we were monitoring is your reservoirs because island of Taiwan, very important to keep the water. I surf, so I know different islands. Water is very important.

I don’t know what this is because we tried, but we don’t understand what it is. Let’s say this is like hail or something. If the vegetation is dropping, it could lead to a landslide potentially. This could be a disaster management product as well.

Anyway, I’m very passionate about this. Using satellite, basically, I’m highlighting that this area, for some reason, we don’t know why, but somehow the vegetation just dropped. If we continue to monitor the urban settings on a continued basis, potentially we can highlight some anomalies.

I have some discussions with the SDG director in Rwanda. I’m trying to help them visualize their reports because they have no way to validate what people are sharing with them. I’m trying to bring facts for them by using satellite.

The other thing we’re passionate is in the urban setting, identify greenery and also find anomaly that’s happening in the city. I’m wearing this, but I’m not wearing this because I know there’s a thing up. That’s not true. [laughs] That’s not the reason.

What I want to do is I want to do this for a bigger area. If you can tell me or some of our friends can tell me the right area to monitor the agricultural studies here, that’ll be great.

Exactly. I love talking to you because you get it. When I share this to people, they’re like, “OK. Yeah.” This is expensive. I just did it because I wanted to see how it works, and it actually works.

I just did it. Nobody paid for me. This is very expensive. Every time I do this, I invest my money.

What we also are passionate is trying to convert difficult concepts into an intuitive visual so that people with no background can just get it. This is from Taiwan, in one of the farm in Taiwan. We played around. We didn’t have enough data because we don’t continue to take ...

The other thing that we do is, because we have a lot of data, we do parcel delineation, training the computer to do this automatically, and visualizing so that anyone can understand difficult numbers, just pictures.

One other thing we can do with our satellite is identify the vegetation. This is just nothing but using an IRR to do this and giving you an example on the rice paddy. This is time series of rice paddies being captured.

If we are able to bring some technology, maybe we can help identify a way to make it more efficient and environmentally friendly. I’m very passionate about sustainable business since 20 years.

Again, what I want to start off with here is agriculture because I heard that there are more and more imports into Taiwan for rice, for example. I went to some of the organic shop here. It’s exciting that you see organically grown rice.

The other thing is even though we are getting this big image, each of the image itself you get is 2.5 meter per pixel, which is another fascinating thing for me because you have a useful image. I’m just skipping. We have basically six spectral buttons. We are proud of ...

In the context of Taiwan, as you can see, it makes it very easy for us to cover the entirety. Now, this is a stark contrast, for example, from aerial or maybe drone. Yes, you have other options, but to do this, not so easy. That’s one.

The other thing is that this is a proud image for us. Our satellite is 100 kilogram size, not so big, but because of our relatively big CubeSat arena, it allows us to capture 50 kilometer with 500 kilometer length in one capture.

Stereoscopic. It’s cool. We’re just playing around.

Right now, the frequency is 12 days, but because we launched four additional satellites, it’s going to be three days in June. We also have attitude control system which allows us to do this kind of maneuver to take a 3D image. In urban setting — this is Tokyo — ...

Yes. Today, I’m going to be showing you some stuff as well. Our satellite imagery…I’m going to remind you that we take from 600 kilometer altitude at roughly 11:30 AM every day.

I just — I say, “I just.” because in our space industry, this is very low price comparatively. — I just need $2.8 million per annum to drive this forward. If I can find a proper resource, we can do this right away.

Exactly. Maybe we can start mosaicing and then finally become AxelTaiwan. Basically, I borrowed your time today to share my idea for this and to seek your blessing so that I can find an opportunity to talk to people and maybe seek your help to talk to the right people ...

That’s one idea, by the way.

We may be able to identify an agricultural area, which I see taking our HSR down to Tienen all the time, beautiful rice paddy. Maybe we can identify one of those as a target area. Start from there if that’s a good option, and then if it works out and ...

[laughs] Let’s say we can do the City of Taipei. I’m more interested in contributing to agriculture here. Maybe find an agricultural area where it makes sense — I’m not an expert — and where is the best place.

Exactly. We do fast prototyping, of course. That is the entirety of the project. If somebody is interested in exploring the idea, we can start prototyping by focusing on specific area.

I calculate it and it will come down to…

To capture entire Taiwan?

For producing the data.

The data.

First, we can do a product and services for the local market. Once it’s matured, this could be another source of export product service that Taiwan can potentially nurture. This project will cost me roughly $2.8 million per annum.