Dan Hammer and Robin Kraft founded Whizbang Systems in June 2010 to spread the gospel of cloud computing, spatial analysis, GIS and the use of satellite imagery for environmental monitoring. They currently provide economic and geographic analysis and research services to several DC-based research institutions.They got into this field through their work on Forest Monitoring for Action (FORMA: cgdev.org/forma), a satellite-based system for identifying forest clearing across the tropics. The massive amounts of satellite data used to drive FORMA pushed them to use a cloud computing platform to manage and analyze it all. Much to their delight, this allowed them to build a parallel processing system at very low cost, a system that facilitates processing and analyzing huge amounts of GIS data much more quickly than they ever thought possible.They currently use this cloud-based system to do large-scale spatial data analysis and GIS modeling using open source tools whenever possible.