One of the co-founders of UrtheCast, Wade Larson was a presenter during our November 9th Comm 101 class. UrtheCast is a company that will be installing two high-definition cameras onboard the International Space Station. Everything recorded by these cameras will be on the UrtheCast website site where individuals can see the Earth at any moment.
When the first video was shown explaining the company, I was amazed because the idea seemed somewhat impossible. Being able to see what is happening in our world, at any time of the day, and being able to fast-forward and rewriting is quite fascinating, especially because it hasn’t been done before.
At the begining of the presentation, I was confused whether Wade was presenting his business plan to us or if the company had already been established. Further on to the presentation, my question was fully answered as he stated the company had already been given money from investors and how the Russian government had signed a 10 year lease with them, allowing UrtheCast cameras on their satellites.
Although UrtheCast’s long-term business plan is great, there are some areas that seem too optimistic. One being that Russia only signed a 10 year plan, what happens if Russia doesn’t want to be involved after, all the hard work and money invested into UrtheCast will be wasted.
Wade Larson also mentioned that UrtheCast cameras will be able to determine where individuals are when they tweet. Reason being, is because they want to prevent individuals from being harassed or hurt. This seems very difficult to do, as a fellow student asked, “how can you distinguish between important tweets and normal tweets”. This was a great question because unless there is a large team of individuals who continuously read through all of the tweets to filter out the non-important one’s, this idea will be impossible.
Therefore, UrtheCast has the potential to be extremely successful, however, I think the company should focus on their website that provides online footage and selling their data to the media before getting involved with the twitter world.
Sources:
http://www.gizmag.com/urthecast-earth-video-platform/19020/