TRANSPARENCY: MapBox Plans to Bring You Super-Fresh Satellite Imagery.

Basically, MapBox will be your GIS person. Herwig says the plan is to make ready-to-go processed imagery available for purchase on an image-by-image basis to people with MapBox accounts (signing up is free), the same way songs are available to people with iTunes accounts.

And these images will be fresh. How fresh? Their goal is to have images all over the globe available six hours after they’re acquired. Unless you’re the CIA or NSA or the military, six hours is practically real-time in the realm of Earth from space. The key is knowing how to process the images in a really quick way that can scale up — something the MapBox guys tell me they can do. If they are right, this will mean I will be able to easily get the most recent image of any spot on the globe, and so will you.

Wow.

UPDATE: Link was wrong before. Fixed now. Sorry!