Benjamin Allard: So, we’re just waiting for Will to join. Hopefully he should be on in a few minutes.

Audrey Tang: Sure, so the sound is working good for you?

Benjamin Allard: Yup. I can hear just fine.

Benjamin Allard: So, Audrey, maybe just quick introductions before Will joins. I know you’ve met and interacted with Will previously.

Benjamin Allard: So, my name is Ben Allard. I head up the Planet’s business for Asia Pacific in Japan, and so Taiwan is obviously part of my geo responsibilities. I’m looking forward to the conversation today and obviously future conversations as well.

Audrey Tang: Excellent. Well, maybe we’ll do the round of introduction after Will joins. This is my deputy minister of digital affairs, Dr. Herming Chiueh.

Will Marshall: Hello, nice to meet you.

Herming Chiueh: Nice to meet you! Sorry I didn’t have the voice working in my previous connection.

Audrey Tang: That’s fine because Will just joined anyway. So, a proper round of introduction maybe? I’m Audrey Tang, minister of digital affairs, and also chair of National Institute of Cyber Security. And I’m here with our deputy minister, the CIO and CISO of our ministry.

Audrey Tang: Maybe Dr. Chiueh would like to say a few words?

Herming Chiueh: Hi.

Audrey Tang: Okay. It’s just to make sure your microphone is working.

Herming Chiueh: Yeah. I think my microphone is okay.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, it’s perfect now. Good.

Benjamin Allard: Will, I gave a brief introduction earlier, so…

Will Marshall: Fantastic. My name is Will Marshall. I’m the co-founder and CEO of Planet.

Benjamin Allard: Yeah, the audio is still not fantastic, Will.

Will Marshall: I gotta change location but…

Benjamin Allard: Sure. Will, I’ll let you kick off that conversation.

Will Marshall: Yeah, happy to do that. And is this better from a connection standpoint?

Audrey Tang: Yes, much better.

Will Marshall: I was in a room that I think I had unbeknownst to me, it was a bit of a Faraday cage… [laughter]… but hopefully this makes it a bit better.

Audrey Tang: Okay, does the chair have any questions? Because I understand you have a meeting in less than an hour from now.

Herming Chiueh: I’m just wondering, so when you were talking about those information from satellites… How quick, when you have a new order… I mean how many satellites do you have and how quick can you move the orbit to get the image?

Will Marshall: That’s a great question. We have about 200 satellites, it’s the largest Earth imaging fleet by about a factor of 10. We produce almost 100 times more imagery than any other Earth imaging company. We get the data back within a few hours typically: the lowest is about 2 or 3, the highest is about 24 depending on your requirements and needs. So, it’s a little bit more expensive for us to do the high time ones.

Will Marshall: We are also working to improve that substantively. Our next fleet that is launching, the first demo satellite that is going up later this year will have 30-minute latency. So, from when you say I want a picture of this location… I want a picture of Hong Kong. It will go get that picture and get it back to you within 30 minutes. And that’s using satellite-to-satellite communications that we’re putting on our next generation of satellites

Benjamin Allard: And Dr Chiueh, just on that piece… It’s the combination of satellite technology that provides an advantage from a Planet perspective, so when Will talked about the monitoring or our Dove satellites that basically provide imaging of the earth every day, it will identify locations that you’re potentially not looking at. And then you can basically use one of our high-resolution satellites, so either SkySat or when Will was talking about our Pelican constellation, to then go and task and get a more granular, accurate view of what’s happening on the ground.

Benjamin Allard: So, if you think about like sort of operational, situational awareness capabilities, it’s the combination between what we do on the monitoring side and what we do in terms of on the tasking side that provides a bit of an advantage from a Planet perspective.

Herming Chiueh: Okay, thank you.

Audrey Tang: Great. Sorry, you go ahead, Will.

Will Marshall: No, no.

Will Marshall: But what were you going to ask, Audrey?

Audrey Tang: Oh, I was just asking Dr. Chiueh because we’re having quite a few conversations with other satellite providers and constellation providers. So, I was about to ask exactly the same question like, what is your preferred structure going forward?

Will Marshall: Is this to us or to…

Audrey Tang: This is to both of you. Do you have other regional representatives that you would prefer us to visit or prefer them to visit us in Dr. Chiueh’s site? Maybe like… we can figure out a working level contacts once we receive your regional contacts? Or, if you, as you said, you’re based in some other jurisdiction, then maybe we can reach you somewhere else?

Benjamin Allard: So, Audrey, on that basis, I can take the lead around follow-up conversations. We have a team that already is involved and engaged within the Taiwan market, so we can certainly schedule a follow-up conversation and go more into depth around the topics that we’ve discussed with Will on the phone.

Benjamin Allard: So, we can walk through those specific examples as to how we do it, what the advantage is from a Planet capability perspective, and then we can also talk to those proof points or situations in terms of where we have customers that are already using us and the value and the benefit that they’re getting out of their relationship with Planet.

Audrey Tang: Okay. Does this sound good to you, Will?

Will Marshall: Oh yes, I thought you were asking Herming… No, no, absolutely. Ben leads a whole region of Asia Pacific. He’s based in Australia. We also have a team of people in Singapore who can come and visit very easily from there.

Will Marshall: My only comment to our approach would be… People traditionally buy satellite data by thinking about tasks to specific known locations. The big advantage of our system is because we cover every square meter on the whole Earth every day. So, things have changed dramatically because of the cost of infrastructure of our satellite fleet, which costs just a few hundred thousand dollars per satellite rather than a billion dollars per satellite. And so, the whole cost has changed dramatically.

Will Marshall: What we have found works most well is when countries just lean into like, getting the whole area of interest and then letting everyone in their system have access to that, then they find lots of use cases that they didn’t even know that they would wanted to when they get access. That’s just a contemplation.

Audrey Tang: Okay, Dr. Chiueh, as I understand, just returned from Australia.

Audrey Tang: And we’re actually planning future visits to Australia later in the year, so maybe Australia would be a natural place to meet up. But you also mentioned flying in from Singapore isn’t that difficult either, so I’m satisfied with that answer. Thank you.

Benjamin Allard: And we can also talk about the existing business that we do within Taiwan as well, Audrey, specifically within the intelligence community.

Audrey Tang: Sure.

Benjamin Allard: So, I think it’s worthwhile looking at the business relationship we already have, and then how we can potentially leverage that and extend that to your needs as well.

Herming Chiueh: Okay, yeah. Thank you very much. Sorry I need to go to another meeting.

Will Marshall: Thank you. It is very, very nice to meet you. And I’m sorry that I was in a poor connection so you don’t get to see my face, but Audrey knows it’s not very pretty anyway, so…

Audrey Tang: You are far too humble.

Will Marshall: At least we got to meet you, thank you very, very much for your time.

Herming Chiueh: Sure, thank you. Bye.

Will Marshall: Audrey, do you have a little bit more time as well?

Audrey Tang: Yes, so I’m interested in the sustainability of the cases. Say that if we want to provide it, for example, to spot new pollution centers, like people burning green stocks or whatever…

Audrey Tang: Then, two questions. First, is the license open enough so that we can actually share it to the civil society organization analysts? That’s the first one. And the second question: How well known is your satellites used for this sort of use cases in the international community, in the public press, so that we can cite examples like this?

Will Marshall: Did you say a pollution, an illegal pollution?

Audrey Tang: Right, illegal pollution in Taiwan. There are many, for example, people burning like… farm lands…

Will Marshall: I see. And what about river pollution, is that an issue?

Audrey Tang: Sure, we do have waterboxes, that is to say, a comprehensive water quality sensing instrument that is part of our civil IoT platform. So, we’re quite confident, if not super confident, of the actual cause of river pollutions because we know where to look at and because rivers are fixed most of the time. But like random burning, in random places, of course, it’s not planned so we cannot actually tell our drones or other vehicles of higher resolution to look.

Will Marshall: I’m not aware of anyone doing exactly that use case. I can remember that we only pass over once per day, so we get a snapshot of all of Taiwan, you know, one about 10.30, 11. We can do it more frequent, but then you need to know where to look which is sort of not the point, not the case study that you’re saying.

Will Marshall: I do think we can pick up these fires and at least direct resources to the areas where this is happening commonly. I’m not aware of anyone else doing that, but maybe Ben, are you aware of any other country doing something like that?

Benjamin Allard: I’m not, Will, but I’ll certainly look into this sustainability issue. I mean, we have, independent of whether we’re talking about things in a pollution sort of context… Like we do a bunch of stuff with civil government around what we’d refer to as things like a permit and code enforcement, so… Where are people building that they shouldn’t be building? Where are they performing illegal deforestation activities?

Benjamin Allard: So, there is a range of different use cases that we have for civil government outside of the defense and intelligence piece. And then obviously on the pollution side of the house, there are also some new capabilities that we’re looking to bring to market which is our hyperspectral capability called Tanager, which you’ll start to look at potentially some of those more nuanced use cases just given the signatures that we need to be able to pick up.

Audrey Tang: The current relationship with the Central Weather Bureau with the MODIS and the VIIRS-carrying satellites - Terra, Aqua, and Suomi illustrates this use case. So, this is something that Taiwan is already doing and I was just thinking of ways that the Taiwanese public and MPs are already like quite familiar with how satellites can be used. And then if your satellite provides more value, then it’s easier.

Will Marshall: Interesting. I think that’s interesting. Also, any other priorities from a sustainability side that we can also look at whilst we’re looking into things that may be relevant to you?

Audrey Tang: There is of course. Doctor Chiueh already mentioned TASA. The space agency worked with NASA on the NASA hackathons which you should know already. And the Taiwanese teams I think won top prizes for a couple consecutive years.

Will Marshall: Alright, cool.

Audrey Tang: So, there’s already a NASA imagery-friendly student and professor’s community that can use the imagery and discover good uses, so if you search for NASA Space Apps Challenge Taiwan, you’ll see their particular use cases. And NASA, through the de facto embassy AIT, has reached out to us to gauge our willingness as a newly incorporated ministry to kind of partner with TASA on expanding the sustainability uses of such imagery in for example, our presidential hackathon and other venues. And we’re still evaluating that, so this is the presidential hackathon that is open to the public…

Will Marshall: Well, that is very, very cool. I mean, that’s something that we can certainly support. We do support the NASA international apps challenge, Space Apps Challenge every year, but we could do some dedicated things. We can also look at what they’ve been doing and see if there are applications that we want to build out.

Will Marshall: NASA actually provides our data to all the university researchers across the United States which has led to tremendous innovation. And something else we could also consider is whether or not there’s a way we can…

Will Marshall: I don’t know if we already work with any universities in the country. Ben, do you happen to know?

Benjamin Allard: Hm. I’ll have to go and just double check in terms of the university footprint. But Audrey, there’s a number of programs that I think that Will’s referring to. One we refer to is the education research program. So, how do we get people access to Planet data to be able to support these types of activities but more at scale through the university channel.

Benjamin Allard: There’s also what we refer to as a tech startup program. So, how can we look at tech startups within Taiwan that are interested in working within the earth observation market, and how do we work with them to be able to give them early access to data to be able to build capabilities and to be able to therefore, foster the market within Taiwan as well.

Benjamin Allard: So, there’s a number of programs that we can follow up and have conversations with you around.

Audrey Tang: Okay, great

Will Marshall: And other ideas, Audrey. I don’t know if this is of interest at all but sometimes, we put countries in all manner of other sustainability issues. For example, transitioning agriculture to sustainable agriculture so we can monitor the sustainable agriculture practices. We do this a lot in the EU. So, things like, are they using tilling or cover crops? And this can help bring and keep the carbon in the soil which is a huge benefit.

Will Marshall: There is monitoring illegal deforestation. I can’t imagine that being a huge challenge in Taiwan but that’s something that we’ve done before. There is monitoring coastal waters and other sensitive ecosystems like parks, if they’re big for encroachment. I don’t know if that’s something of interest. And then we’re very keen to help countries establish more park areas and marine protected areas which we can help them to monitor as part of the 30 by 30 initiative of the UN.

Will Marshall: So, those are a couple of other areas. Do any of those sound relevant, interesting?

Audrey Tang: Yes, so do you have an existing relationship with TASA who are planning more or less the same use cases with our Central Weather Bureau, Ministry of Agriculture, Environmental Ministry, and so on? Like do you already have contact with our space agency?

Will Marshall: I’m not aware of that. Do you know, Ben?

Benjamin Allard: I’m not aware of that. I’m sure we’ve had outreach and conversations previously, Audrey. I’ll have to go back and just sort of double check the context around those, then I can provide you an update as to the current level of discussion with TASA.

Benjamin Allard: Space agencies in general, we’re having those conversations with multiple different agencies in other different countries across Asia. So, that is a very common vehicle to have conversations around collaboration when it looks at the sustainability agenda

Audrey Tang: Yeah. Because our work in the ministry — aside from cyber security — we’re also in charge of presidential hackathon and many other civic tech activities, if it’s already ready to be co-created with the private sector and the civil society organization.

Audrey Tang: But for more exploratory uses, that is to say, things that may or may not land next year is research, and that is the science and technology council. Of course, I’m a council member, but TASA is part of the NSTC and not our ministry, which is why, because for your more exploratory uses, I think it makes more sense to reach into a platform in which pretty much half of the ministries are members, so to broadcast instead of like truly optimized to a specific digital use case.

Will Marshall: Audrey, if… You go first, Ben.

Benjamin Allard: I was just going to say, Audrey, when we look at broad-based use across multiple agencies within government, this is where we start to explore when does it make sense for looking at things like a whole of government license to Planet, so that we don’t start to deal with things with individual agencies but we look at it more holistically, what the value and opportunity is. So, we can certainly explore those types of opportunities in future conversations as well.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I would be very interested in that. Yeah please, Will.

Will Marshall: Yeah, I was only going to add that… Sorry there’s a time delay… It might be very helpful to have a connection at the right level, maybe in the head of the space agency to talk about this. I’m not aware of any formal discussions we’ve ever had with them, so it could have happened but I doubt it happened at a senior level if I’m not aware at all. That’s just my guess.

Audrey Tang: Yeah well, I just pasted you the current satellites. So, from my own experience, because I’m in charge of communication resilience for the time where the submarine cables are caused by earthquakes… And so of course, we work with TASA, but they also understand that because of our unique resiliency requirements: we prefer to work with observability of vendors, that is to say, we want the adversary to be asymmetrically in a difficult position where they have to compromise three different satellite systems in order to deny us communication.

Audrey Tang: So, we talk with like one web, you know, with the usual suspects TASA, SES to make sure that we are asymmetrically at an advantage when it comes to the heterogeneity. Now, I think TASA will understand this particular use case. They also understand that by working with multiple providers, they also learn what the actual needs are, therefore can calibrate their own capabilities to fill the gaps, so to speak, that the Taiwanese people need but none of the international satellite providers provide. So far, we’ve had a pretty fruitful relationship with them. I think Taiwan’s unique geopolitical situation…

Will Marshall: Yep, understood. Understood.

Benjamin Allard: And Audrey, when it comes to… We can certainly have a conversation around the resiliency-type of capabilities within the Planet constellations. It’s one of the core tenants as to how we actually build and operate our constellations and how that helps in terms of with distributed access to imagery outside of either sovereign capabilities or other commercial providers as well.

Audrey Tang: Is it just downloading from the satellites? Or do you also have uplink bandwidth?

Will Marshall: We uplink and downlink with dual X-band from our 50 or so ground stations around the planet. And to Ben’s point, there’s an inherent resilience to our system by having 200 satellites. So, for example, Maxar, the biggest earth imaging company today has four satellites. And the difference between that is that if one system goes down or gets dazzled or jammed, it’s more vulnerable to those sort of situations.

Will Marshall: The unique thing about the Planet is being so distributed.

Will Marshall: No, I mean in all seriousness, the value proposition of more recent imagery of the earth obviously, you know, crosses a huge number. We looked at the sustainable development goals and we think that we can have a measurement of 13 of those 17 sustainable development goals in significant ways. And when you produce real value that helps the world with its biggest challenges, of course there’s a way of providing a business out of that. And our company is a public benefit corporation which allows us to even lean into the non-profit side of this, the academic side of this, use cases in developing countries and other things where they don’t have the budget. Because we believe in just trying to do good, but we also believe in the entrepreneurial side to keep on iterating the technology really fast which is why it’s good to be a company.

Will Marshall: So, we really balance this by being a public benefit corporation, this new form of corporation in California that’s possible, that enables to marry those things.

Will Marshall: One final thing, one final idea on the sustainability side, we very briefly touched on it when you came to San Francisco. There is a fantastic potential now I think to enable carbon markets. I think we’re on the verge of enabling carbon markets at scale to offset, if you like, the big carbon impact of especially the developed world by helping to protect the forests of the developing world. Primarily it’s like that, but it’s not just about that.

Will Marshall: Because we have, if you can imagine Microsoft or you know, Sweden wants to offset their carbon, but right now the only way to measure the carbon in the trees is through tape measures around tree trunks which is very accurate but not scalable. And the satellite data from Landsat was too coarse to do it accurately, but it was scalable. And so, you end up with green washing systems there.

Will Marshall: With our data we can actually get an individual tree carbon without going locally, and because of the canopy structure information that we get in our data. And so together with that and blockchain or smart contracts, we should be able to go straight from that Microsoft or Sweden to offset carbon by buying directly from indigenous peoples and stewards of land in developing countries around the world. Give them money in exchange for them protecting those forests and then those donor entities get the carbon credits to offset their carbon.

Will Marshall: I think we’re on the very edge of being able to do that and we just launched in Washington, D.C, where we had our annual user conference where we announced that we’re doing a planetary carbon, what we call planetary variable which is literally a data feed, no imagery involved. You just tell us the location; we’ll tell you how much forest carbon a function of time and to underpin the forest carbon system.

Will Marshall: If Taiwan is interested in being involved with doing that at any scale, that is another area where we’d be delighted to have conversations. I know a lot of countries are thinking about this in advance of COP28 in UAE.

Audrey Tang: So just to ask a clarifying question. You said there is a real-time feed. Is it a public feed that people can verify like an Oracle function on the blockchain? Or is it a private subscription?

Will Marshall: Well, to date we haven’t sorted out all those details. We just announced what we’re going to be building is the database underneath that, exactly how we’re going to provide access. What we have typically done with those sort of thing is made some available as a digital public good, especially if we have sponsor countries and some is privately done. So yes, it’s like an Oracle database of carbon over time for each tree on the planet. And this is, I think, what we need to underpin carbon market.

Will Marshall: So, the exact details, if you like, of how we provide this data is dependent. We do cost us real money to put satellites up, of course, so we have to cover those costs. What we have done in the past is make strategic partnerships like we did with Norway, to make a monthly base map of all the world’s tropical forests covered and available as a digital public good for NGOs and others to look at and researchers, as well as the daily imagery to the forestry ministries in 64 tropical forest countries. So, one could imagine a similar thing for this sort of carbon map, if we want, we could make a monthly or yearly verifiable thing but the underlying feed has to be commercialized somehow.

Will Marshall: Anyway, so we’re open to ideas along those lines but it hasn’t been finalized.

Audrey Tang: Okay, great. So, as I mentioned when we met in San Francisco, in my ministry there is a dedicated department called Democracy Network that works on decentralized use cases — we have a Plurality section for web3, we have a civic tech section, but we also have a net zero partnership section for precisely this sort of collaboration.

Audrey Tang: So, while I’m not very tuned in on the details of their work with the environmental ministries around the world including our own, I am aware that they are working on a public digital infrastructure for the kind of carbon counting that you just mentioned.

Audrey Tang: So, maybe that can be an element in it but of course it will require inter-ministry coordination. I expect, because this transcript will be co-edited for 10 days and opened. And I assume that this part will be less read-active than the first half of our conversation. What I will do is just ask my colleagues here to circulate this transcript to the Department of Democracy Network and see how this can fit this into our existing planning.

Audrey Tang: And I think it is really possible as part of either the TASA, as part of NASA Space Apps Challenge, or more easily with our upcoming  Presidential Hackathon to work as kind of a demonstration, because the top champions, like the two champions of International Track of our Presidential Hackathon is invited to the presidential office to give a speech to all the ambassadors and so on to Taiwan, and also to work with all ministries to find actual use cases and also to make those domestic champions, the five champions that are guaranteed to get fiscal, regulatory and personnel to amplify their local ideas into country-wide ideas.

Audrey Tang: So, if one or two of the teams that wins this year’s Presidential Hackathon uses your real-time data, forestry data, or any imaging data, then it does the convincing for us, right? Because there’s the legitimacy across all the different ministries and the embassies to Taiwan as well. So, I would encourage you to look into the International Track and maybe either work as a data contributor or just participate as a team or anything like that. And then we can arrange this demo to the president and many other things going forward.

Will Marshall: That sounds fantastic. So can you help us provide a connection with them if they’re interested?

Audrey Tang: Well, we run the presidential hackathon.

Will Marshall: Okay.

Benjamin Allard: I had a quick look at the website and the video. What’s the timing of the hackathon for this year, Audrey?

Audrey Tang: We just kicked off. The registration to participate is today and ends on May 31st. And there’s a handbook on how to participate. So, maybe you or one of the teams that work closely to you… You mentioned a lot of teams already like possible connections of your previous NASA Space Apps Challenge connections or your Net Zero connections with Nordic countries. So, if they’re interested in participation, at least what we can do is to introduce this idea in general to all the judges. And also, if it works well, then also give it a presidential platform where everybody will join.

Benjamin Allard: I understand.

Audrey Tang: So, the scoring this year is very interesting because you have to be open, digital and green, at least two out of the three. So, to provide its democratic value, its digital transformation value and its sustainability value, and if an idea takes care of all three values, it automatically gets a higher score than an idea that only takes care of two of the three values. And so, something that is participatory in the digital transformation tool or sustainability, that is the kind of ideas we’re looking for.

Benjamin Allard: Awesome. I’ll have a little bit more of a look at this when I have some time tomorrow, Audrey, but if that provides us with the ability to get more exposure across a variety of different people and be able to demonstrate proof points as to how we can do this and how we can help to remain interested in potentially participating.

Audrey Tang: Okay, excellent. The previous years of presidential hackathons, many of the ideas were incubated by the open contracting partnership for the transparency and accountability in government procurements, again, to prevent greenwashing. But I don’t think this imagery has been used extensively in the previous couple of years, so it will be quite refreshing to see things from this angle.

Benjamin Allard: Okay, perfect.

Will Marshall: Fantastic. Audrey, you’ve been so generous with your time. Thank you. And it was so really, really lovely for me to hear. I really think that your help in navigating this and the sustainability forward-leaning attitude that you have, presents an opportunity to collaborate that I’ve rarely seen in countries.

Will Marshall: So, we’d be delighted, obviously we have to look at the specific use cases of where we can help, but it’s actually really going to bring real value to you. I don’t want to pre-empt that but it strikes me that there’s going to be several areas and we want to be collaborative and long-term partners if it makes sense to do so.

Will Marshall: So, I just want to emphasize that we like to build long-term relationships where it makes sense and we’ll listen to your needs as a customer but we share a lot in vision and philosophy that makes me feel very confident. I feel like there’s going to be ways in which we can collaborate, so thank you very, very much.

Audrey Tang: Let’s work together to ensure Taiwan’s long-term existence — the foundation of long-term relationships.

Will Marshall: Exactly, right, exactly. And so, thank you and thank you in advance for your help as the Digital Minister helping us to navigate this because it’s not always easy for us to find the right people or how to connect, or if you could help us be that interlocker we would really, really appreciate that.

Will Marshall: Well, and my job is to make you successful, so thank you very, very much. Planet is keen to help and support countries shine a light on global events that include security and sustainability.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Will Marshall: Thanks a lot.

Audrey Tang: Do you have anything to say as a concluding remark, maybe from Ben?

Benjamin Allard: Audrey, Taiwan is a very important market for Planet in Asia-Pacific. I think this is the first step to being able to move in that direction, so I appreciate your time today.

Audrey Tang: Okay, thank you. Thank you for your time.