Earth now- A live surveillance project for Earth is now backed by Bill gates

EarthNow which is a new space imaging startup has recently made an announcement that it intends to 'deploy a large constellation of advanced imaging satellites which will deliver real-time, continuous video of almost any place in the earth. The startup, which is the latest company to emerge from the Intellectual Venture ISF Incubator, is said to be backed by AirBus, the Softbank Group, Bill Gates, and satellite-industry veteran Greg Wyler for its first round of funding.

According to some sources from the web, the company has not made any revelations regarding the initial amount; however, the announcement claims that the funding primarily "focuses on maturing the overall system design in order to deliver innovative and unique-real time earth observations services."

Further, every satellite which will be deployed by EarthNow is said to be equipped with "an unprecedented amount" of processing power and features a number of CPU cores than all the other commercial satellites combined together. It is being further reported that along with capturing the satellites will also be able to broadcast live video, and the satellite will also do an onboard analysis of the live imagery by making the use of machine learning. The company, however, hasn't revealed that what exactly it will use the data for, it has also listed down a number of potential uses for its network which includes:

"Catching illegal fishing in the act, watching hurricanes and typhoons as they evolve, detecting forest fires the moment they start, watching volcanoes the instant they start to erupt, assisting the media in telling stories from around the world, tracking large whales as they migrate, helping "smart cities" become more efficient, providing on-demand data about crop health, and observing conflict zones around the world."

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Further, the company has not revealed that how much the Gates' contribution to the project, however, it is being believed that the global goodwill that is associated with the name will be helpful for the company to overcome policy-related backlash which the company might experience while deploying large-scale surveillance which affects the entire population.