'The value of geospatial information has continued to grow as satellite imagery and GPS data become increasingly timely and accessible,' wrote Skybox on its blog. Integrating geospatial navigation just adds more information to the package. Space imagery companies aren't trying to encourage the connected citizenry to become DIY spies they're offering business intelligence, marketing analytics based on surveillance data to the commercial sector. It's early-but the idea of more data is really exciting.'

'Seeing the aircraft headed to a specific terminal provided context to help identify it and watching cars move down a road shows directionality useful for better road classification. 'The idea of video from space is very new but the benefit of seeing movement and direction over many frames is amazing,' Mapbox's Paul Goodman wrote on the company blog yesterday. They can also chart the exact direction cars are driving in.

In the case of the Beijing airport, map-makers used public flight logs to identify the plane in the video as Air China Limited flight 1310, flying from Guangzhous to Beijing. Since the video-map is online, developers can pull in whatever additional data they want to supplement the footage. It's pretty crazy stuff, like living inside a video game. Just think, instead of a little blue dot, your GPS app shows your actual car moving along the map as you drive. It's a peek at the next-generation of digital cartography: moving maps, based on super-detailed continuous footage from the sky. The video sits on top of a static satellite image that's overlain by a map layer-created as an experiment by Skybox and the open-source map company MapBox. Satellite imagery is always pretty cool to watch, but unlike previous examples this video is also integrated with a map and pulls in data from the web.

Google satellite camera live