Cadell Asks Us To Rescale Our Way of Thinking

The keynote speaker for GeoIgnite, Winter Geo conference on March 2, 2022, was Will Cadell, Founder, and CEO of Sparkgeo. 

Cadell leads a team of geospatial experts who create solutions at a web scale and provide geospatial advice. He has been helping startups, non-profits, and large enterprises to make the most of geospatial technologies and location. 

The topic of Scale was discussed, using three types of scales. The types were geographic, web architecture, and business. Cadell spoke about the idea of planetary scale as it deals with the work of the geospatial community. He said our society is being challenged with planetary issues, so needs to adjust society’s thinking appropriately. Society needs to learn how geospatial technology can be used to handle these issues ethically. 

Since remote sensing fell out of favour in the early 2000s, the world’s population has increased by 1.7 billion people and there has been an increase of half a degree Celsius. 

“Chains of events are becoming the story of our changing climate,” said Cadell. 

Planetary scale refers to a planet that has become increasingly connected but also fragmented. Events happening in one area are deeply affecting another or all other areas. This impacts our society as we are dependent on globalization. 

Cadell said, “It is a lot more fragile than we understand it to be.”

Cadell spoke about new capabilities and new considerations, such as readily available recent imagery and reasonable pricing for pixels for algorithms. He talked about subscribing to a location instead of buying images, and normalized pixels from across a constellation. 

A deep, heartfelt thank you to Sparkgeo, a Gold Sponsor for Canada’s National Geospatial Conference, GeoIgnite, Winter Geo.

An interesting Q and A session followed the presentation. You can watch this interesting presentation on Youtube below.