Just like my classmate Elyssa Heng, “I really enjoyed Thursday’s COMM 101 class”. It was refreshing to gain insights from the entrepreneur Wade Larson, co-founder of UrtheCast. One of my take-away from this lecture was both the confidence and the acknowledgment of risks/uncertainty Wade Larson demonstrated: it was truly inspirational!

UrtheCast, if everything goes as planned, will be “launching the world’s first high-definition video platform on Earth streamed from space.” To do so, they will be operating two cameras onboard the International Space Station to the underside of the Russian segment (one medium-resolution and one high-resolution). As the station orbits the globe, Earth imagery will be streamed to the web in near real-time casting a unique view of the world.

To know more about it, watch this video:

My first impressions, unlike Elyssa’s, were not that the value proposition wouldn’t work because of the competition of Google Earth and Google Maps. In fact, it first occurred to me that UrtheCast had probably faced important negotiations related to the ethics challenged by its technology. My worries were quickly satisfied though since the question was asked by another student and Wade Larson could explain us that the camera would not be able to see individuals per se but crowds at most.

>Moreover, I enjoyed listening about the multiplicity of actors and stakeholders from newspapers to individuals, public spatial agencies, businesses looking for advertising opportunities, social media, applications developers, political institutions, etc. I would love to experience such variety of interactions and it definitely reinforced my wish to be in a managerial position if I continue in Business.

Finally, I also found myself very interested by the economic justifications of the Business Model: UrtheCast remains a relatively cheap venture because it operates on the ISS and consequently does not need to offset the costs of a satellite. More importantly, that means that UrtheCast will be able to offer a product both highly differentiated and low cost. Wade Larson insisted on this rare reality in the world of Business without naming it… But I know that this is a perfect example of the Blue Ocean Strategy (see 08/10/2012 post).

Sources:
– http://www.urthecast.com