UrtheCast Corp. (TSX:UR) ("UrtheCast" or the "Company") today announces that it has signed a strategic partnership with OmniEarth, Inc. (“OmniEarth”) in support of UrtheCast’s planned UrtheDaily Constellation, expected to be capable of imaging 140 million square kilometers of the global landmass every day at 5 meters GSD. The UrtheCast-OmniEarth partnership includes collaborative system development, the sharing of intellectual property, and joint customer marketing activities.
Based in Arlington, VA, OmniEarth is a leading data analytics company and a large consumer of Earth imagery. The company specializes in image processing, data fusion, and predictive analytics, in essence turning big data into actionable intelligence. One of OmniEarth’s leading products is a tool for water utilities that estimates water demand, but the company has also served the energy industry, the agricultural sector, and the US Federal Government.
“We are delighted to announce a strategic partnership with UrtheCast and to make a commitment to using the UrtheDaily system,” stated Dr. Lars Dyrud, OmniEarth’s CEO. “The OmniEarth team has long recognized the value of daily revisit, and we are thrilled to work with UrtheCast to help develop UrtheDaily, a mission designed from the ground-up to produce ‘exquisite’, analytics-ready, scientific quality data that is required to fully realize the potential for many large geoanalytics markets, and particularly for digital agriculture. UrtheDaily will bring machine learning and automated geoanalytics to whole new markets—and will do so at a scale never before achieved.”
One of the key target market areas for UrtheDaily is the rapidly-growing demand for in-season precision agriculture. Daily revisit, combined with UrtheCast’s scalable data distribution capabilities enabled by its cloud-based UrthePlatform, are anticipated to enable growers to proactively measure and manage crop health and identify pest infestation early enough to prevent major losses. Other domains that will benefit from daily coverage of the global landmass include asset monitoring, environmental monitoring, change detection for intelligence applications, and a host of financial prediction applications in areas such as retail and freight monitoring.
“We are really excited about this partnership,” explained UrtheCast’s President and Chief Executive Officer, Wade Larson. “Not only is this a significant endorsement of the UrtheDaily solution from a company that is an undisputed technology leader in geoanalytics, but it is also a major step forward for us commercially in bringing to fruition our UrtheDaily plans, which we believe will set the new gold standard - particularly in the digital agricultural sector - for many years to come. Partnering with OmniEarth in the final design stage will help to ensure that the constellation delivers the precise imagery products that digital agriculture and numerous other geoanalytics markets demand.”
UrtheCast (and its subsidiary Deimos Imaging) will be exhibiting and meeting customers at the InfoAg Conference in St. Louis, Missouri, on August 2-4, 2016. The Company’s representatives will be sharing further details on the planned market-leading capabilities of UrtheDaily for agriculture, as well as immediate opportunities today with UrtheCast’s current sensor suite, including its Deimos-1 satellite.
Source : Urthecast