Here's an interview from a couple years ago with one of the founders of Urthecast about the cameras, the partnerships, and the business model: http://www.sensorsandsystems.com/dialog/interviews/27327-urt...

It's a great interview if you are looking for details on the technical details of the project. Here's a sample:

GT: There are two cameras. One is a classic, push-broom,
medium-resolution, four-band imager. It is built for space
with our partner Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL).
They had this camera available, it could be built
relatively inexpensively, it isn’t particularly large, and
it is made for space, so it became a good fit. At the
altitude at which the space station flies it gives you a
5.5 meter pixel size on the ground or ground sampling
distance (GSD).

The other thing that made this project possible is that
RSC Energia and Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, had
already decided to experiment with a camera on the ISS.
They had defined the experiment, rolled it all up, and
obtained the approval of all the partners, but had not
decided what the camera would be. So, when we came along,
they loved the idea, and they already had, essentially, a
programmatic way to enable it immediately. They had also
developed a very high accuracy pointing platform that can
point to plus or minus 175 degrees in each of two axes,
which means that you can steer it to track a point on the
ground. You can also flip it up and look at space targets.
Once this project got traction with them — and they liked
it a lot — they had a competition to decide who would get
to use their pointing platform. We participated and they
decided to give the platform to our project. We are very
happy about that. That’s what enabled the video cam.

We are typically able to track a spot on the ground for a
minute and a half and take video or images. To make it
work and get good resolution you need to have that kind of
pointing system. To build it from scratch would have been
quite expensive. The video camera has an aperture of 32
centimeters, so it is essentially an astronomy telescope.
It was built by an American company and over the past year
has been ruggedized, so that it is suitable for space. The
manufacturer already had the parts for this telescope
because they built one for another customer and had some
spare parts that we were able to buy right away. We were
able to put it on a test stand to check it for vibration
and work out whether it was possible to make it suitable
for space, which we confirmed last summer. So, very
quickly that gave us a telescope of the right size and
performance and at the right price point for our project.

As for the detector, we are are using a commercial 18
MegaPixel detector from a professional grade DSLR camera
that we have radiation tested to ensure it will work in
space. The camera electronics is built by RAL, who are
leveraging their extensive know-how and technology they
have developed for the numerous other optical instruments
they built for space. There is nothing really special
about the technology, other than that we couldn’t do a
NASA-style development costing many tens of millions of
dollars. It is a commercial project and it has to be
affordable.