But today, it would be trivial – and cheap, measured in tens of dollars – to give Tom what he wanted: accurate, up-to-date photographs of almost any part of the planet. Such images are used by hedge funds and commodities traders in precisely the way my boss envisaged. These companies count cars in shopping-mall parking lots to estimate customer demand, and ultimately assess how well the retail sector is going. Or they analyse the shadows cast by oil tankers to estimate their load – and hence the global demand for oil. Lemonade, an American insurance company, uses satellite imaging to estimate
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