This morning I finished watching the rest of Steve Jurvetson’s Spark 2014 talk, which I shared with you all yesterday. And so I’ve got technology on the brain right now.

I’ve said this many times before on ATC, but I truly believe that the pace in which technology is infiltrating “non-technology” companies is only going to increase. The video clip of Flux.io is a perfect example of that. After watching that demo yesterday, I immediately thought a handful of consultants that real estate developers use on projects that the Flux platform could replace.

So today I thought I would share another company that Steve talks about in yesterday’s video called Planet Labs. Planet Labs’ mission to image the entire world and make it universally accessible to people. But unlike Google and Microsoft – who already offer satellite photography – Planet Labs has figured out a cost effective way to do it on a daily basis.

Because the problem with services like Google Maps and Bing is that they’re updated too infrequently. If I go to Google Maps right now, the building I live in doesn’t even exist in their aerial photography of Toronto – it’s still a parking lot. So there are limits to what you can do with this information.

But once you increase the image frequency to daily, you create all sorts of new opportunities. You could track the number of cars in every parking lot in the world to measure retail activity (an example Steve gives in his talk). You could track changing water levels. You could track deforestation. You could track urbanization in China. And the list goes on. Here’s a blog post from Planet Labs that gives a few examples of the benefits of daily imaging.

To return to my earlier point, consider the fact that every potential use case I’ve just outlined is in an industry that most of you wouldn’t consider to be tech. And yet Planet Labs is clearly a technology company. So the key insight here is really to focus less on the way things are done and classified today, and more on the way they could be – and likely will be – done in the future.

Image: Planet Labs

Jevon MacDonald of StartupNorth published an interesting article today called, You are supposed to break the rules. It talks about entrepreneurship and how great companies are built by disregarding the way things are done today.

And I think it’s for that reason that many stupid sounding ideas (think Airbnb and its initial idea of offering air mattresses) actually turn out to be great ideas. In reality, they weren’t stupid ideas. They just contravened the norm, and that made them sound stupid. It made people feel uncomfortable. And as humans, we tend to have a bias towards things that reinforce our existing view of the world.

In any case, Jevon talks about some of the “big rules” that are being broken today. His list includes:

• You can’t dispatch drivers without doing X

• Cars can only be sold through dealerships

• You can’t expose the MLS to the public, freely.

• Hotels are just rooms, but there are a lot of other rooms travellers should be able to rent. Many cities are fighting that.

But really he’s talking about Uber, Tesla, and Airbnb. They are the startups breaking those rules. However, that’s old news for most of us. What’s more interesting are the following two takeaways.

The first is his prediction that startups are going to start running into more and more regulatory hurdles. In other words, we’re going to see more, not less, litigation. And I think he’s right. As technology starts to creep into other industries (like it has with the taxi industry, the car industry, and the hospitality industry), we’ll probably see a lot of incumbents fighting to hold on.

The second interesting takeaway for me was that out of his list of “big rules”, the real estate industry (i.e. the MLS) is the only one that doesn’t have a formidable disruptor attached to it. Which makes me wonder: Is something like Opendoor.com inevitable?

I’ve been a big fan of MIT’s Senseable City Lab since I was a grad student at Penn. Their work sits at the intersection of cities and technology, and so I’ve always found it incredibly fascinating.

Recently, the lab examined data from all of New York’s 13,586 registered cabs and looked for ways that technology and mobile tech could potentially optimize the way the system works today. In particular, they were interested in examining instances where people were heading to the same place at the same time, and were within no more than a 3 minute walk of each at the start of the trip.

What they found was that, of the 150 million taxi rides taken in New York City during 2011, almost 80% of them could have been shared.

That is, 80% of the time, there was an overlap in both time and route. That’s an hugely interesting stat because it starts to show just how much waste and inefficiency there currently is in the system. Think about all the trips and carbon emissions that could be potentially eliminated through optimization.

Here’s a video they produced on the project. Click here if you can’t see it below.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gyq_Zr96uzs?rel=0]

It’s a great example of how technology is and will continue to creep into every segment of the economy. It’s exactly what I was talking about in my post, “Disrupting everything.”