The MapScaping Podcast - GIS, Geospatial, Remote Sensing, earth observation and digital geography

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 of the first websites combining panoramic images with a map back in 2005, before Google Street View existed, and he holds a Guinness World Record for a 320-gigapixel image of London stitched together from 52,000 photos.

In this episode, we get into what a modern mapping-grade 360 camera actually looks like, and why the difference between rolling shutter and global shutter sensors matters if you care about things like colorizing point clouds or photogrammetry. We also cover the surprisingly long tail of people who need up-to-date street-level imagery — everyone from departments of transport and utilities companies to playground designers and outdoor furniture salespeople.

A few things that stood out:

Ground-level 360 capture fills gaps that drones and satellites simply can't — occlusion, permissions, and viewing angle all favor eye-level imagery for certain infrastructure work.

Companies are taking very different bets on data collection strategy — Mosaic focuses on high-quality, purpose-built capture, while others like Hive Mapper are betting on scale and crowdsourced coverage instead.

The camera hardware race may be plateauing, but the real frontier now is what we do with the imagery once it's collected — especially as large language models start being layered on top of geospatial data.

Where does this all go next? If AI can eventually parse and reason over an entire country's worth of street-level imagery, what does that unlock — and who ends up owning that layer of the map?

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 into the awkward question most open source projects avoid: how do you keep something free and open while paying real people to build and maintain it?

Marco has been in the open source world since 2007, and he's grown QField into a tool with over two million downloads and a team of 14 behind it. We talk through how the money actually works — from sponsored feature development, to donations, to the cloud service that now funds most of what they do. Marco makes a compelling case that the real product isn't the software at all; it's convenience. You can always run it yourself. Paying just makes life easier — and keeps the project alive for everyone who can't.

We also get into why he refuses to say "free software," what maintainer burnout really looks like, and his advice for any developer quietly drowning in a project they love but can't afford to keep running.

A candid conversation about money, sustainability, and being a good citizen in the open source ecosystem.

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 conversation, we dig into what he calls the great retooling: the idea that cloud-native geospatial is about to flip from an emerging pattern to the dominant one, and that AI is the thing tipping it over the edge.

The argument is simple — agents want to discover your data, query it, transform it, and hand back an answer. If your data isn't in a format they can reach, you're simply not part of the conversation anymore.

A really enjoyable one. I hope you get as much out of it as I did.

Register for the forum 👉 https://2026.cloudnativegeo.org

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This episode is sponsored by the Cloud Native Geospatial Forum. The CNG Forum 2026 runs October 6–9 at Snowbird, Utah — three days of real-world cloud-native geospatial (STAC, COGs, GeoParquet, Zarr, and more) with the teams actually building this stuff at scale, plus a hands-on workshop day to kick things off. Register at https://2026.cloudnativegeo.org

What is Earth observation, really — and why, after fifty years of satellite imagery, is it still not "mainstream"?

In this episode, I'm joined by Aravind Ravichandran, founder of TerraWatch, an independent research and advisory firm focused entirely on Earth observation. Aravind writes the TerraWatch newsletter, runs the EO Summit, and spends his time thinking about the strategy and economics of the industry more deeply than just about anyone.

We start with a deceptively simple question — is Earth observation even an industry? — and end up somewhere more interesting: Aravind's argument that when the technology truly succeeds, it becomes invisible, quietly embedded in agriculture, insurance, energy, and defense the same way weather satellites already are.

Along the way, we get into:

Why 60+ countries are now building their own satellite constellations, and whether they'll still exist in five years

What Planet restricting imagery access really means — and why Aravind thinks they were "punished for doing something progressive"

The technology is actually moving the needle: hyperspectral data going free, AI foundation models, edge computing on satellites, and inter-satellite laser links

Which use cases are genuinely picking up (utilities, parametric insurance) — and which were always hype (counting cars in parking lots)

The defense paradox: how the industry that built Earth observation may also be the biggest thing holding back its commercial future

Some open questions we sit with: If satellite data is critical infrastructure, what happens when someone turns it off?

Should high-resolution imagery of the whole world be open — and what are the privacy and security costs if it is? And can sixty countries ever pool their data, or will sovereignty always trump logic?

Ryan Shields has one of the most interesting careers in geospatial — from remote sensing for conservation in the Caribbean, to disaster response data engineering with FEMA, to his current role turning spatial data into animation assets for Johnny Harris's YouTube channel at New Press.

In this episode, Ryan counts down the 10 tools he's using right now to tell map stories that reach millions of viewers. We cover Felt, PostGIS on Crunchy Bridge, Geo Layers 3 for After Effects, CShapes for historical borders, Natural Earth, MapTiler, Mapshaper, the new GDAL pipeline syntax, GRASS GIS, and how he's stitching it all together with Claude Code and VS Code.

Along the way we get into how LLMs are changing geospatial workflows, why command-line tools are well-suited to AI agents, the limits of de facto vs de jure borders in historical datasets, and how better tooling is making data journalism viable for small communities that newsrooms usually overlook.

Whether you're a cartographer, data engineer, journalist, or just map-curious, this one is packed with links worth chasing.

 

Tools & resources mentioned in this episode

Felt — https://felt.com

PostGIS — https://postgis.net

Crunchy Bridge — https://www.crunchybridge.com

Geo Layers 3 (After Effects extension) — https://aescripts.com/geolayers/ ⚠️ verify

CShapes (historical borders dataset) — https://icr.ethz.ch/data/cshapes/ ⚠️ verify

Open Historical Map — https://www.openhistoricalmap.org

Natural Earth — https://www.naturalearthdata.com

Eduard (Swiss-style hillshading app) — https://www.eduard.earth ⚠️ verify

Shaded Relief (Tom Patterson) — https://www.shadedrelief.com

MapTiler — https://www.maptiler.com

MapTiler Engine — https://www.maptiler.com/engine/

EPSG.io — https://epsg.io

Mapshaper — https://mapshaper.org

GDAL — https://gdal.org

GRASS GIS — https://grass.osgeo.org

QGIS — https://qgis.org

DBeaver — https://dbeaver.io

Claude Code — https://claude.com/claude-code ⚠️ verify

VS Code — https://code.visualstudio.com

Geodata Viewer (VS Code extension) — search "Geodata Viewer" in the VS Code marketplace

PAI – Personal AI Infrastructure (Daniel Miessler) — https://github.com/danielmiessler ⚠️ verify exact repo

Deep State Map (Ukraine conflict) — https://deepstatemap.live

Johnny Harris (YouTube) — https://www.youtube.com/@johnnyharris

Projects I'm working on

Quick Map Tools — https://quickmaptools.com

Hunting NZ — https://huntingnz.com

NZ Elevation Tools — https://nzelevationtools.com

Smart Query Tools — https://smartquerytools.com