Last month, Facebook announced that its Connectivity Lab had mapped 21.6 million square kilometers (8.3 million square miles) of land to find where people were living. With this data, the company would have the information necessary to make flight plans for its internet drone, Aquila, or show which populations were located too far from a water supply.
DigitalGlobe is an imaging company that uses a constellation of five satellites to beam downincredible pictures of Earth. In the past year, the companycollected more than one billion square kilometers of imagery, and they've turned to the public to choose which of their images deserves the title ofTop Commercial Satellite Image of the Year. They went through the impossible task of whittling it down to 20 finalists, and on December 17, DigitalGlobe will announce the top five, as voted on via Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, and Twitter.