Uber has already revolutionized transportation by making it simple.

Now Uber plans to make it even more accurate and trouble-free, using current, high-resolution satellite imagery from DigitalGlobe to identify the best pick-up and drop-off locations.

Urban landscapes are always in flux: new lanes, construction everywhere, altered traffic patterns. With its frequent revisits, our satellite constellation often detects these street-scale changes before a city adds them to its official vector map, improving the experience for riders and drivers around the world.

And even beyond the value of precise end-route navigation to human drivers today, this level of geolocation accuracy will become increasingly important in the years ahead, as Uber embraces the digital globe in its transition to a fleet of fully autonomous cars.

Wireless demand continues to accelerate globally, as exploding populations of always-on users demand more bandwidth for more data, stressing even the most robust networks.

Optimizing network growth and capacity is an ongoing race to maximize radio frequency (RF) coverage, which means planning the most efficient antenna configurations—now and for years to come. A key factor in that planning: accurate terrain maps.

In Latin America, our French partner Siradel leveraged our deep stereo archive of high-resolution, time-lapse imagery to develop their RF propagation model, revealing gaps in network quality they use to guide future growth.

With this cost-effective methodology and DigitalGlobe’s up-to-date global coverage, Siradel can now conduct large-scale, wireless network design in literally any environment.

The seventh-most populous nation in the world couldn't accurately map its roads or measure its cities. More than 50 years old, Nigeria’s outdated analog maps were unreliable colonial-era remnants, rendered even less useful by decades of the country’s explosive growth and environmental changes.

Without current maps, planners were ill-equipped to make informed decisions regarding land, infrastructure, and resource use for an ever-increasing population, more than half living below the poverty line.

Until Aerial-View Solutions, our Nigerian partner, offered an affordable solution. Using DigitalGlobe’s current and high-resolution imagery, they addressed long-standing mapping problems, including spotting encroachment and creating street guidesand township maps where they did not exist before.

With the spatial insight from an accurate, current countrywide map, Nigeria stands better prepared to address the challenges facing a modern nation.

Existing population maps for many remote parts of the world are outdated, so to reach the 4.2 billion people still offline, Facebook is analyzing billions of DigitalGlobe’s highest-resolution images to create the most accurate population density models ever.

Starting from DigitalGlobe’s mosaic of the globe at 50cm resolution, Facebook’s computer-vision algorithms leverage our Geospatial Big Data platform, GBDX, to identify man-made structures as a proxy for where people live. Facebook can then see how best to deploy terrestrial networks, satellites, and its massive solar-powered Aquila drones to provide low-cost Internet connectivity to the developing world.

Advances like these, in cloud computing and deep learning, help everyone. That’s why we’ll be adding population estimation tools to GBDX’s platform, to allow us all to build and innovate together.