Video Of The Week: More AirCraft

I’m excited about AirCraft, which I blogged about yesterday.

Here’s a short teaser that Dronebase put up on YouTube yesterday:

#drones

Comments (Archived):

  1. John Pepper

    I must be offically getting old and closed-minded, but some of the features in this video here seem to destroy otherwise beautiful video from above. Here’s one I did of our town in Norwich, VT this winter… can’t imagine wanting to “enhance” it with anything else. I’ll try to remain open-minded and see if my opinion evolves… whether it does or not, I have a feeling this whole theme will take off without me ;). http://bit.ly/2nSpXSz

    1. creative group

      seabird37:Beautiful to look at but we prefer warm weather climates. We wonder aloud how much the love of snow activities is cultural.What type of drone did you use? And did you register it with The FAA? (Of course you have)

    2. LE

      This is great. I wonder if you can get it (must be a way) to fly the same exact route so you can make a video a week or at least a month or on season change. Showing the exact same (with editing) route blending by day or season.

    3. Nicholas Osgood

      You can upload that footage into DroneBase via our Getty Images Partnership (unless you are already on Getty).

  2. creative group

    CONTRIBUTORS:When and not if Amazon decides (timing) to dominate the drone delivery sector what happens to this startup?This question had to be asked by smart money.

    1. fredwilson

      They don’t do delivery. Never have. Never will

      1. creative group

        fredwilson:”They don’t do delivery. Never have. Never will” -FredVery misleading and confusing response. We had to misread or misunderstood that response.Drones are already in beta for Amazon.Wow. The facts……https://www.theverge.com/20https://www.theverge.com/20…Amazon Flex is a delivery service of Amazon. Amazon Fresh is another delivery service of Amazon.Correction accepted in advance…….

        1. fredwilson

          I was referring to Dronebase not Amazon

  3. jamakiliaki

    test

  4. LIAD

    Pokemon Go 2.0 in the making

  5. William Mougayar

    Nice. This was the drone pic I referred to yesterday from Steemfest.Can you find me there? https://uploads.disquscdn.c

      1. William Mougayar

        Nope. Far from it 🙂 Second try ?

        1. LE

          Hah. To uncover if I had time I would simply eliminate all ‘not William’ which would leave me with a bunch of possibilities to narrow down. And ‘far from it’ means I can probably eliminate 30 to 40% that are not ‘far from it’.I am not finding any hi res images anywhere but that would be cheating if I did and used that.

          1. William Mougayar

            You know what, I was to the far left talking to a couple of people, and we kept going in and out of the main crowd, but I think the final pic missed us. Sorry, I don’t mean to trick you, but I thought I was the guy with the blue jacket on the left with hand over forehead.

    1. jason wright

      who’s the scarecrow?

  6. PhilipSugar

    It’s all about advertising (which is great). Why would I pay somebody to fly a drone mission for me? Monitor stuff, maybe for art, but to advertise my location, I want my logo virtually showing over my establishment.Now of course it also is fun. And that is a great bonus and helps adoption. Don’t underestimate that. I truly believe the demise of Blackberry was because they sold to IT departments, they did not want “fun” stuff on phones that would “waste time”, but users did.You know like many really interesting things drones are such a confluence of different technologies….high capacity batteries, powerful brushless motors, cheap small digital gyros, great high pixel digital cameras, flash storage with huge capacity, wireless high speed digital communications, massive fast tiny cheap computing power.And….they are all so inexpensive!!!Think about the cost this would have been five years ago? Helicopter, gyro cam, skilled pilot, camera person and film. Just amazing.

    1. LE

      I truly believe the demise of Blackberry was because they sold to IT departments, they did not want “fun” stuff on phones that would “waste time”, but users did.Blackberry was killed because the iphone was a better mousetrap. And Apple simply out engineered them. Not that I know but no stretch that the talent at Apple led by Steve Jobs would completely flatten the crew and management at Blackberry. Blackberry was big when the iphone came out. So my point is even if Blackberry had games that wouldn’t have meant that much. And games existed under Windows and Windows was deployed by IT departments (vs. the Mac) and also under DOS.Who can forget Obama and his blackberry cited in the NYT article circa 2008:http://www.nytimes.com/2008

      1. PhilipSugar

        We strongly disagree. At the time I was independent and my policy was to give an allowance for phones and laptops. I would see people on planes 100 times a year with two phones. Now this is a serious pain in the ass ask Hillary 🙂 please no other comments on that snarky remark. I resisted smart phones because I didn’t want people just expecting to reach me and have me respond instantly. I turn off voicemail, I do regulate my email to once an hour, and never an hour before bed or an hour after getting up.I would ask why????? Universally? My Blackberry can’t do X.Now why is this??? Because Blackberry sucked???? No.Two decades of building enterprise systems has taught me that the buyers of big enterprise systems don’t give a shit about the users, they care about their pet feature and covering their ass.Who thinks forcing you to change your password on login without notice and having to include a capital letter, symbol, and number and not being able to use the last five passwords is a good idea? Corporate IT people.Tell people you are changing each year? Or you are changing in a week? Got it. Telling people that the password must be a phrase like I love my “animal” who’s name is “xxxx” is ten times more secure and easy.But no, IT people force enterprise vendors to build features that are universally hated by the users.I fly under the radar, I dress super casually, I just hang out if we are at a show. Universally, I mean every time I get somebody that says I love your product but I hate that it makes me do X. Every time, every single time I cringe because it was feature that an IT person said: “I won’t buy your product unless you agree to X, or if you don’t put in feature X we are going to have to look elsewhere”

        1. PhilipSugar

          Steve jobs quote on Enterprise: What I love about the consumer market, that I always hated about the enterprise market, is that we come up with a product, we try to tell everybody about it, and every person votes for themselves. They go ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ and if enough of them say ‘yes,’ we get to come to work tomorrow. That’s how it works. It’s really simple. With the enterprise market, it’s not so simple. The people that use the products don’t decide for themselves, and the people that make those decisions sometimes are confused. We love just trying to make the best products in the world for people and having them tell us by how they vote with their wallets whether we’re on track or not. This was about the iPhone.http://www.zdnet.com/articl

          1. LE

            Jobs (like Trump) is better at manipulating people and making money from them. But others (like Gates, Ellison) have a niche in manipulating IT departments and corporations. It’s all a matter of what kind of mood you are in (Billy Joel – Scenes from an Italian Restaurant.) or what you are good at. [1][1] To me online dating was the greatest thing every invented. Others think it sucks and give up on it.

        2. LE

          Agree 100% with your take on corporate types and that market. You know nobody ever got fired for requiring the same screwy pw that the others asked for.But it seems that you are trying to say that Blackberry with games and fun would have actually stood a chance against the iphone with games and fun. That can’t be true. Or that Blackberry could have had the engineering talent to make an Iphone or even garner the hype.This is like someone saying that I would love a Dodge as much as the Porsche if it could do the same thing. First I don’t believe Dodge could ever get the design and engineering that Porsche has. And second I’d have to actually sit and get my car serviced at a Dodge dealer. [1] And third there would be no party in my brain. [2][1] This is not relevant to any point but honestly it’s not the same experience…[2] Look you are not going to doubt that part of your like of your old truck is what it makes you think you are when you drive it.

          1. PhilipSugar

            How about a viper? I’ve driven one. They will smoke your porche

          2. LE

            It’s a Dodge. It has a hideous look (to me) as well as fit and finish. Why does it even matter how fast it goes? (And I wouldn’t say ‘smoke’ is correct but that’s besides the point).

          3. PhilipSugar

            Ok, don’t want to argue cars but the top three 0-60 are Nissan, Ford, Chevy. My point is Porsche engineers are able to operate without constraints (like it needs to come in at this price, and we need to make a million of these) and when you let other teams do this they can do a good job. Look at the flat production figures of Tesla’s. Either they are not in demand, they are constraining supply to ensure demand, or they can’t ramp production. I bet on the last.But my point is this. More and more the consumer (and that can be the end corporate user) is getting to decide on their technology.That has some profound implications. In general big corporate decisions are made on the basis of: price, not screwing up (i.e. don’t take any chances), and usually a feature that somebody has in their mind which makes things harder for the userLook at something like Dropbox compared to the corporate alternatives.I also think that big Enterprise systems are here to stay. An Amex exec once told me when I said “I can screw up three times and come to the result faster than you can make a decision”……”Yes, that’s true but getting fired is not enough punishment for screwing up at Amex because the cost can be in the Billions”For the record I own seven iPhones, four MacBooks, four iPads, two desktop Macs. (and and HP, xBox, and PS4)

          4. LE

            To the Tesla point Porsche is well known for constraining production such that they produce 1 less car than they can sell as part of the strategy. And let’s face it other than the SUV’s (I also own one of those and it’s the best car I ever bought all around) the market is limited. You know in the 911 you can’t even put adults in the back seats. That is something I found out after I picked up the car. And I still bought 2 more in later years. So that is the type of product that you want to try and sell to the luxury market. Something where people want one so much that they will put up with the defects.Look despite what anyone says NYC is also that product. People put up with all the negatives because they love the place for what it is not what it isn’t. Obviously Philly has much of what NYC has (on a much smaller scale) without many of the drawbacks. But values RE wise there are nothing like NYC.

    2. LE

      Back when I flew RC Gas Helicopters in the mid 80’s (probably $5000 in todays dollars) there weren’t even gyros (let alone computer control) other than I think I had a tail gyro. Actually no I don’t I think I even had that. I had to self correct for the force by countering with the stick. I have a video of me flying one that I will post some time. You learned by crashing it and rebuilding it. Part of the fun was actually driving to the hobby shop and picking out the parts. I was self taught. [1] Took a long long time to get to the point of being able to hover and actually fly it around. As I have said all of the electronics now take the fun out of the hobby. And I have a field next to my office (where a real state police helicopter for the hospital used to land no less).I saw an early electric back then. They were flying it in the back of the hobby store. It needed an ac power cord attached to ‘fly’. I think the point was to learn how to hover.I’ve told the story here about how only a few years ago with a cheap chinese heli with modern electronic control I almost suffered tragedy when it failed and almost hit me. I took it apart ‘crash investigation’ and found a tooth missing from a cheap plastic gear. Back in the days of course all of that was brass.[1] A rc heli crash is not like a rc plane crash. In an rc heli crash the chopper literally chews itself up. Kind of cool in a way. I had one situation where the metal frame broke apart because the blades weren’t balanced and the vibration faulted the metal. You learned by doing this that way. Nothing I use today of course but it was interesting.

  7. jason wright

    the sequel (or will this become the mini series?), and one can never have too much of a good (but not google) thing. i still don’t get it.