Location Based Intelligence: Chefs, Recipes, Entrees, and Automats

Throughout much of my career, and especially now as a Director of Product Management at DigitalGlobe, I have often found it helpful to use analogies from familiar everyday concepts to compare and contrast complex aspects of strategy and direction. It can also be useful to explain new concepts and capabilities, as well as derive (semi) logical outcomes from examining how these analogous familiar areas function or have evolved over time.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about food. More specifically how food is prepared and delivered and how this compares to the state of today’s Location Based Intelligence space.

Now, editorial note upfront, I know I’m leaving out a LARGE part of the entire lifecycle of food (Farmers, Markets, Farmer’s Markets, Food Co-ops, etc.) with this article. Not to mention larger issues dealing specifically with food (Food Security, Food Scarcity, and World Hunger) that are also important. However, if you can suspend thought on those areas for a few minutes while I explore this subsection of how food is prepared and consumed, I think you’ll understand my thinking.  

Chefs

In today’s burgeoning world of geo big data, planetary data available at scale, advances in machine learning and cloud computing, along with the plethora of additional social, location, and mobile (and soon IoTT) information sources, the majority of businesses or startups striving to deliver answers and insights in new ways are what I like to think of as “Chefs”.

Why? Because Chefs have trained for years to understand all the right ingredients (data sources), manners of preparing and cooking (algorithms and analytics), and presentation (UI/Ux) to deliver something a customer (user) wants.

While these individuals or organizations are innovators, they cannot necessarily feed everyone anything they want, whenever they want it. Because of that fact, they tend to specialize around cuisine (industry/problem space). This requires people (organizations) to seek out the right Chef/restaurant for the type of thing they are hungry (have a business need) for.

Recipes

Recipes contain all the “information” needed to replicate a dish that a Chef has created. This means that more people can consume a Chef’s product, but don’t have to have the Chef who created the recipe prepare it for them. This is a good thing, as the Chef’s knowledge and innovation can be distilled into a format that others can reproduce. However, as we all know from preparing a new recipe/dish at home for the first time, this can take a bit of effort or practice to effectively prepare at the same level of quality as did the Chef. That’s because while obtaining a recipe may be possible, having the intrinsic “expertise” of the Chef is not. Notwithstanding this fact, Recipes are important as they are repeatable steps with identified components and processes to generate a specific type of outcome.

Entrees

Getting hungry yet? I look at Entrees as the end-state of the answer or insight that individuals (end-users) are looking to consume. They are specific things that they are hungry for, need or want, and they are happy when they get them (provided they are tasty of course!). While I could write an entire separate post on the importance of a good Entree, the main takeaway here is that people just want food. They want quality and demand variety based on their daily preference (or need) and they really don’t care about the recipe or the chef (or those farmers I mentioned earlier) or where the ingredients came from (when was the last time you contemplated where the flour in your enchilada combo was grown?).

Automats

Automats are unique things. An automat allows individuals to simply select from any number of Entrees, derived from any number of Recipes, and dreamt up by any number of Chefs without the customer having to understand anything about how or what happened upstream of obtaining their Entree. An individual simply walks up to the Automat, can see what Entrees are available, selects the one(s) they want, pays, and is on their way. Automats can also offer variety as they can obtain Entrees from multiple Chefs made with multiple Recipes, adding more and more products subject only to market demand for what people want to consume. Automats are aggregators and simplifiers - designed to provide choice, convenience, efficiency, and scale.

Where is this going?

Hopefully you’ve followed the above premise and are now asking yourself “ok, so what does this mean to the Location Based Intelligence and Remote Sensing space”

Here’s my take.

Today’s market is full of Chefs. These are some pretty darn cool innovators who are whipping up unheard of Entrees with never before used ingredients! These are folks like Descartes Labs, Cuende, PrecisionHawk, and others.

They are delivering things that have never been created, or were impossible to create before new techniques (Machine Learning, Ubiquitous Cloud Computing, Remote Sensing at Scale, Big Data Analytics, etc.) were available. They are leading the industry in imagination, but you have to know who they are and where to find them.

But, with the recent explosion and emphasis on the above areas within the tech and business trade rag space, and the huge maturation of open source (and the open sourcing of many new capabilities by major brands including Google, Baidu, Facebook, etc.), some hungry people (businesses) are finding that they can locate some of these Recipes (or at least Ingredients) on their own. Making these Recipes on your own though is a time consuming and costly process that requires the ability and willingness to make an investment of time and resources in order to get it right. Don’t expect that Entree to be what you expected when you set off on your own to make it for the first time.

Many folks taking up this effort and willing to spend the time to try making these Recipes on their own are finding that out. While I applaud the early adopters, and while they will end up succeeding, they have to commit to learning or discovering at least part of what the Chef knew (that they might not have) in order to be successful.

Becoming an Automat

Ideally, and almost always with the maturation and adoption of nearly any technical capability, you end up with Automats.

Automats make it dead simple to consume these Entrees (capabilities) with just about zero knowledge of who (Chefs) or how (Recipes) they were created. Who are some examples of Automats? Well, the largest and most recognizable of them are Amazon and Google. An Automat you say? Really? Yes, really!

Both Google and Amazon developed, acquired, absorbed, and grew by taking incredibly hard to do things, then offering them at scale in easy to use ways to individuals who never would have previously been consumers of these types of capabilities before.

Search the entire web instantly getting relevant pages, videos, facts, etc. using some of the most sophisticated search mechanisms and algorithms ever designed? Oh yea, that’s a web-page with the logo Google and a little blue bordered rectangle with two buttons beneath it.

Want access to nearly any product on the market today (including books, music, TV/movies) as well as ubiquitous Virtual Machines (EC2), Cloud Storage (S3), Database as a Service (DynamoDB), etc.? Well, below is the Amazon AWS “Automat” page - yup - literally.

The Amazon AWS “Automat”

https://aws.amazon.com/products/?nc2=h_ql_ny_livestream_blu

So what are we doing here at DigitalGlobe?

Let’s face it, the world NEEDS great Chefs creating awesome Recipes that enable delightful Entrees to be prepared. However, individual consumers (businesses) also demand simplicity, choice, and access to what they need cost-effectively, on-demand, and in a central place.

At DigitalGlobe, we are focused on creating these types of new capabilities. One of the offerings we are working on could be just that… An Automat for getting the answers and insights (entrees) you or your business needs from satellite imagery (ours and others) - simply and easily. Sure we’ve been providing fantastic ingredients to the world (ironically also “of” the world since we produce satellite imagery of the Earth!) for years now, but to get to the next level we need to go beyond the way we’ve traditionally operated. We need to start enabling folks with easy ways to come and enjoy the goodness created by all these innovators in one easy to access place.

Sure, Day One we may just be offering PB&J and chicken salad sandwiches - but over time we can create a place where a veritable buffet of goodness can be offered to suit the needs and tastes of many different palettes (industries and vertical markets). It also can be a fantastic place for those Chefs and Recipes to be tried and made available to folks - simply and easily - and without the messy kitchen!

A few months ago, I posted about my excitement about coming to DigitalGlobe. The good news is, just a bit over three months later, I’m happy to report we’re working feverishly to bring the types of capabilities I’m talking about to market - and they’ll start showing up soon!

Just save a slice of Peanut Butter pie for me, ok?

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P.S. Want the opportunity to experience what it is like to have access to 80+ Petabytes of content and the ability to run ours, yours, and other’s Algorithms against the data in the cloud? Then check out www.geobigdata.io/overview and if you are really interested in finding out more message me on LI or DM me on Twitter for private beta access.