Really cool news about a recent acquisition by Google . Skybox provides high-resolution photography from space and its imagery -- if made widely accessible -- could facilitate many new spatial-analytic studies going forward as daily time steps appear feasible with the Skybox satellite network.

From the company website is this advertisement for their startup origins: "2009, Founders wrote the first Skybox business plan as part of a Stanford graduate entrepreneurship course, Spent 6 months working out of John's living room, Secured Series A financing of $3M from Khosla Ventures, Moved into a windowless 3,000 sqft office in Palo Alto, Began to attract, court, and hire the smartest people they knew to join the vision..."

The 2014 World Cup kicks off in Brazil on Thursday. For the first time ever, goal-line technology has been installed across all twelve stadiums that will host the different world cup games. Three months before the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, FIFA head, Sepp Blatter, dismissed the role for goal line technology in international competition, only to change his mind after several errors were made by the human referees . It will be interesting to see how this works out now that it has been introduced. Apparently, seven cameras are trained on each goal to determine when the ball crosses the line, each system had to correctly determine 2400 test cases to be considered ready to go, and the algorithm has the required capacity to notify the head referee within one second after a given incident via wireless communication to their wrist watch. Cool technology really.

And, whatever you think about FIFA and the World Cup, check out this recent commentary from Jon Oliver to deepen your appreciation and have a laugh/cry while you're at it.