Bill Gates Has Started a New Crusade to Save the World

Some of the world's most influential billionaire philanthropists plan to launch a powerful digital platform to harness the avalanche of data sent from satellites each day—and make it freely available for humanitarian and environmental causes.

Bill and Melinda Gates—who are also custodians of legendary investor Warren Buffet's billions— have joined forces with Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, to fund the Radiant Earth project, a repository and archive of the world's satellite, aerial and drone imagery.

The project, expected to cost "multi millions" of dollars, aims to find ways to combine and analyze Earth data and imagery and offer it free of charge in formats that do not require specific expertise to understand.

Anne Hale Miglarese, Radiant CEO, said the world is now awash in data, but for non-specialists, finding it and creating ways to use it practically can be both difficult and expensive.