Some interesting todbits from MWC today out of Digitalglobe… At the Mobile World Congress today, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg announced the Telecom Infra Project, an initiative to develop new technologies and approaches for connecting the 4.2 billion people that still remain offline.
To enable this, the Facebook Connectivity Lab is leveraging DigitalGlobe’s Geospatial Big Data initiative to determine population densities across vast rural areas in 20 developing nations. If you are going to connect the world, you need to first know where in the world humans live!
… This where DigitalGlobe’s content and platform become a critical part in achieving the vision. DigitalGlobe will be completing an accurate mosaic of the globe at 50 cm resolution in the coming months and will be replenishing this basemap of the world on a frequent basis. Further, DigitalGlobe’s Geospatial Big Data platform, GBDX, makes this rich content along with our 15-year digital library of over 90 petabytes of high resolution DigitalGlobe satellite image data available to anyone, for processing in the cloud.
Check out Facebook’s white paper, “Connecting the World with Better Maps: Data-Assisted Population Distribution Mapping.”
Read more on the Digitalglobe blog