The MapScaping Podcast - GIS, Geospatial, Remote Sensing, earth observation and digital geography9 Joulu 2025

From Data Dump to Data Product

This conversation with Jed Sundwall, Executive Director of Radiant Earth, starts with a simple but crucial distinction: the difference between data and data products. And that distinction matters more than you might think.

We dig into why so many open data portals feel like someone just threw up a bunch of files and called it a day. Sure, the data's technically "open," but is it actually useful? Jed argues we need to be way more precise with our language and intentional about what we're building.

A data product has documentation, clear licensing, consistent formatting, customer support, and most importantly - it'll actually be there tomorrow.

From there, we explore Source Cooperative, which Jed describes as "object storage for people who should never log into a cloud console." It's designed to be invisible infrastructure - the kind you take for granted because it just works. We talk about cloud native concepts, why object storage matters, and what it really means to think like a product manager when publishing data.

The conversation also touches on sustainability - both the financial kind (how do you keep data products alive for 50 years?) and the cultural kind (why do we need organizations designed for the 21st century, not the 20th?). Jed introduces this idea of "gazelles" - smaller, lighter-weight institutions that can move together and actually get things done.

We wrap up talking about why shared understanding matters more than ever, and why making data easier to access and use might be one of the most important things we can do right now.

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Fields Of The World

Where does one field end and the next one begin? It sounds trivial right up until you try to answer it. In this episode, I'm joined by Hannah Kerner — Assistant Professor at Arizona State University, ...

18 Elo 43min

Virtual Worlds for Physical AI Systems

In this episode I'm joined by Apurva Shah, co-founder and CEO of Duality AI, a company building virtual worlds — or "world models" for robots and physical AI systems. Apurva's path here is an unusual ...

4 Elo 49min

GPS, But 100 Times Stronger

My guest today is Tyler Reid, co-founder and CTO of Xona, a company building the first commercial satellite navigation system. We get into why Tyler and his team are moving satellites into low Earth o...

29 Heinä 43min

Turning Aerial Imagery Into a Searchable World

Vexcel isn't a household name — but you've almost certainly used their data. This aerial imaging company flies low-elevation aircraft across roughly 45 countries, capturing imagery at 7.5cm resolution...

28 Heinä 55min

Cloud Native for the Rest of Us

What happens when you take cloud native geospatial out of the satellite-and-petabyte world and drop it into a small city with no budget and the world's slowest internet connection? In this episode, Da...

20 Heinä 38min

Mapping With 360 Cameras

Jeffrey Martin is the co-founder and CEO of Mosaic, a company building 360-degree camera systems designed specifically for mapping. He's been obsessed with 360 imagery for over 20 years — he built one...

15 Heinä 41min

Who Pays for Open Source?

Open source software runs a huge chunk of the geospatial world — but somebody still has to pay for it. In this episode I sit down with Marco Bernasocchi creator of QField and CEO of OpenGIS.ch, to dig...

1 Heinä 54min

The Great Retooling

Ian Schuler is the CEO of Development Seed — the team behind a lot of the open source tooling that quietly holds up the geospatial world. He's been at the helm for over a decade, and in this conversat...

23 Kesä 44min