7 ms·

Most of the good ideas are either massively competitive (aerial inspection/ag support/photography), a pain in the ass due to safety regulatory issues (drone del

by asteli 7y ago

Most of the good ideas are either massively competitive (aerial inspection/ag support/photography), a pain in the ass due to safety regulatory issues (drone delivery, passenger flight), or just bad ideas overall (consumer camera that flies around and tries to follow you). There are occasionally bursts of genius in the field though. A few years ago I met a guy (Sergei at Fotokite, I believe), who was developing a tethered drone for photojournalism. Solves many problems at once: you don't run out of battery, you could control the drone via a stick or just pulling it around by the tether, people don't hate the drones as much when they can see the operator. He demonstrated it by deploying it in the reception area of an office building, probably 15x15ft. Now apparently they're developing a tethered drone for first responders that automatically deploys and gives you a 150' vantage point for situational awareness. BTW: No relation to Sergei or Fotokite, just impressed with their tech.

jcims 7y ago
I need one for point to point internet link to my home out in the boonies. 10M/768k DSL isn't cutting it any more.
- dehrmann 7y ago
  10Mbps DSL means you're two miles from a central office. For $20,000 per mile (maybe less?), you can get fiber run to your house. A friend actually did this.
  - semi-extrinsic 7y ago
    Ubiquiti sells you a pair of AirFibre gigabit microwave links for $3000. I'm sure you can rent a little tower space with fiber internet for a very long time for $36k.
    - jcims 7y ago
      This is the way i will go if i do anything. Got a quote of $9k for an 80’ freestanding tower to get over the tree canopy where i live. Then it’s just hardware costs plus probably $500/mo for gig internet plus antenna placement in town. I could easily sell 100M to 4-5 neighbors for $100/mo.
  - jcims 7y ago
    I got it quoted last year, $32k for fiber to the node (no CO in our case) plus loop to nearest exchange. Their network is terrible and it didn’t make sense to rely on them for IP.
  - kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
    I once had 4Mb one mile from the CO. Then water got in the line and I was moved to a pair that only served 2Mb. That's the beauty of Frontier's customer service.
  - zeristor 7y ago
    Is that all you’d need? You’d be dependent on the capacity at the exchange, might that not need to be upgraded too?
    - jcims 7y ago
      Definitely an issue in our case. This is centurylink and their subscriber IP network is dog dookie (qwest handles the core out here and seems ok). My $32K quote included a loop to a public exchange in the local metro area where I could pick up internet from a huge list of providers.
fisherjeff 7y ago
I’m fairly familiar with one of the businesses in the article and it’s just fascinating to me. They took a solid product that would’ve absolutely made a perfectly good, sustainable business line, added a ton of VC money, and got utterly swallowed up by buzzwords.
- nolok 7y ago
  That can often be a big issue once you take VC money, suddenly successful isn’t enough anymore, you need to reach insanely successful levels.
  - Angostura 7y ago
    My only experience of VC money was during the dot-com bust. Worked at a pretty successful start-up that was good at what it did and was growing organically slowly but nicely. VC money came in and suddenly the CEO was obsessed with hiring people - to show huge amounts of growth. I was sitting there saying "with a little bit of thought we can automate this stuff, go down the pub and watch the money roll in". It lasted about 2 years until everyone lost their jobs and everyone (VCs included) lost their noney.
    - quaquaqua1 7y ago
      But clearly the money guys know best, because they would never act irrationally! /s
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  Reminds me of someone bitching about spending a decade developing a solid business and then a bunch of VC funded companies came like locusts, eating everything, and then promptly died.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    This happens quite a lot. There are some advantages to be had here if you play it clever but you better have a very solid play on how you plan on staying in business while the VC funded companies burn through their capital. At least you'll have a few opportunities to buy cheap Aeron chairs ;)
langitbiru 7y ago
What do you think about this startup: Lucid Drone (https://www.luciddronetech.com/ https://www.luciddronetech.com/)? They use drones for cleaning houses/buildings. It's a part of YC S19 Batch 2.
- toxik 7y ago
  Interesting idea, but ultimately drones are not strong enough to do what they want. It would need to carry itself, the tube, and counteract the force from the spray. Flight time is probably going to be way low.
  - cma 7y ago
    As long as the spray is counterbalanced by a lower pressure higher volume spray in the opposite direction it doesn't need to counter it with throttle.
    - mhb 7y ago
      It still needs to carry the water. And water is heavy.
      - prometheus76 7y ago
        8 lbs. per gallon. Adds up quick in a water line.
        scotty79 7y ago
        Or kilogram per liter for sane people. ;-)
        prometheus76 7y ago
        While you guys were sitting around coming up with your own arbitrary units of measurement, we were actually inventing the two biggest reasons why America is still on US Customary units: the milling machine (in 1816) and the profile lathe (in 1818). (Two other important inventions from America that also created momentum for our system was the steam engine in 1825 and the platform scale in 1830, but I won't go further into those.) Because the milling machine and the profile lathe were invented in America, they were built around the American measuring system, and accounted for America getting a head start in the Industrial Revolution. Those two inventions enabled rapid and consistent manufacturing of innumerable other inventions and tools at the time. By the time the Treaty of the Metre was adopted in 1875, America's manufacturing infrastructure was already 50 years old. The benefits offered by a decimal-based system of measurement were not and still are not significant enough to justify throwing out an entire interconnected structure of tooling, tools, and machines. I work for a custom fabricator (we focus on making highly customized one-off products that are either prototypes or highly specialized), so I have some insight into what it would take for just our shop to convert. We have milling machines that date back to the 1950s. They still work really well and hold tolerances as well as any similar mill on the market today. We would have to replace them and all the tooling that goes with them. Actually, we couldn't just get rid of them. We'd have to keep them and also double (at least) the size of our facilities to hold the new equipment. Why? Because we have long-term support contracts with many of our customers. That means we'd have to have two sets of equipment and two sets of tooling. Some of our contracts are more than 40 years old, so we would have to plan on having both sets of equipment for at least another 40 years. Also, we'd have to reprogram all our other CNC machines to work on metric units only. We also have to convert all of our drawings to metric, and many of those conversions aren't elegant. Try reading 38.5 millimeters on a measuring tape. Try marking it accurately and consistently. Now, I also have to consider that my employees now need to know two sets of measuring units, and be able to switch between them, because there's going to be a long period where some customer drawings are in US units and some are in Metric. That means that sometimes they'll make mistakes, because humans are very good at switching. So now I'll have more re-work and scrap. In short, we may be "insane", but while the SI countries were trying to figure out how to measure things, we were busy inventing and using the machines we needed to actually usher in the Industrial Age. By the time the metric system was finalized, we already had a 50-year head start on building things. Too late to switch. It will never make financial sense to change.
twic 7y ago
Sounds like something you could use a balloon for.
- jmull 7y ago
  A drone would give you control, when you want it. You could add drone-like control mechanisms to a balloon (or a balloon to a drone -- same difference, I guess), but that adds complications, so doesn't seem worth it.
- asteli 7y ago
  This is true. The neat thing about the drone is that you can deploy it super rapidly though. I haven't seen it done but I am imagining 30 seconds or so.
nradov 7y ago
A camera drone that follows you isn't a bad idea necessarily. It can actually produce some amazing video for action sports athletes. But of course that will only be a niche market.
- SamuelAdams 7y ago
  Why not apply this to vehicles? What if every car had a drone on the roof. Drivers could use the drone to look ahead and see how far ahead traffic goes, to see if that next exit really is worth taking. Or drivers could have it constantly surveying their vehicle, so that if a collision occurs, you have a bird's eye view of the incident, which is usually helpful. There's probably other use cases too.
  - cbm-vic-20 7y ago
    A camera on a stick does the same thing?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - jve 7y ago
    Waze already answers if that exit is really worth taking in a much simpler way. Other use cases.. maybe.. but i'm not that excited that a drone follows most cars :) If a drone could bring your electrical vehicle some extra charge by docking on the roof and then going back to closest charger... well that would be a true value added feature.
btreecat 7y ago
Tethered drones are quite interesting. I fly one for our company but we have yet to get much interest in getting it adopted by first responders or LEO. The "unlimited power" comes with some major asterisk from my experience although it is with a different system. * Tethered power works great when plugged into a stable AC source, generators can be less than ideal. * Weather conditions limit your altitude even more so, higher wind requires more power to stay up. * The tether often works against a lot of the stabilization systems built into the drones, so flying them can be a handful under certain conditions * The tether can get bound up on the spool * The higher you go the heavier the tether is Overall though, it's awesome technology with interesting potential. I have kept ours in the air for over 3 hours continuously and only landed so I could take a break.
- slowhand09 7y ago
  Offshore racing sailboats use untethered drones frequently as there is rarely a helicopter available for publicity and action photoshots when 1000km out. I would think tethered would be great for them as they don't want to risk loosing a moneymaker with lots of potential remaining.
  - mvid 7y ago
    Well if it goes into the water, tethered or untethered, it likely won’t be usable anymore
    - slowhand09 7y ago
      True, but in windy conditions, losing or leaving it behind might be a more likely scenario. Being able to retrieve it by pressing as button on a windlass or remote, then being free to attend to other things would be valuable.

by asteli 7y ago

jcims 7y ago

I need one for point to point internet link to my home out in the boonies. 10M/768k DSL isn't cutting it any more.

dehrmann 7y ago
10Mbps DSL means you're two miles from a central office. For $20,000 per mile (maybe less?), you can get fiber run to your house. A friend actually did this.
- semi-extrinsic 7y ago
  Ubiquiti sells you a pair of AirFibre gigabit microwave links for $3000. I'm sure you can rent a little tower space with fiber internet for a very long time for $36k.
  - jcims 7y ago
    This is the way i will go if i do anything. Got a quote of $9k for an 80’ freestanding tower to get over the tree canopy where i live. Then it’s just hardware costs plus probably $500/mo for gig internet plus antenna placement in town. I could easily sell 100M to 4-5 neighbors for $100/mo.
- jcims 7y ago
  I got it quoted last year, $32k for fiber to the node (no CO in our case) plus loop to nearest exchange. Their network is terrible and it didn’t make sense to rely on them for IP.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  I once had 4Mb one mile from the CO. Then water got in the line and I was moved to a pair that only served 2Mb. That's the beauty of Frontier's customer service.
- zeristor 7y ago
  Is that all you’d need? You’d be dependent on the capacity at the exchange, might that not need to be upgraded too?
  - jcims 7y ago
    Definitely an issue in our case. This is centurylink and their subscriber IP network is dog dookie (qwest handles the core out here and seems ok). My $32K quote included a loop to a public exchange in the local metro area where I could pick up internet from a huge list of providers.

fisherjeff 7y ago

I’m fairly familiar with one of the businesses in the article and it’s just fascinating to me. They took a solid product that would’ve absolutely made a perfectly good, sustainable business line, added a ton of VC money, and got utterly swallowed up by buzzwords.

nolok 7y ago
That can often be a big issue once you take VC money, suddenly successful isn’t enough anymore, you need to reach insanely successful levels.
- Angostura 7y ago
  My only experience of VC money was during the dot-com bust. Worked at a pretty successful start-up that was good at what it did and was growing organically slowly but nicely. VC money came in and suddenly the CEO was obsessed with hiring people - to show huge amounts of growth. I was sitting there saying "with a little bit of thought we can automate this stuff, go down the pub and watch the money roll in". It lasted about 2 years until everyone lost their jobs and everyone (VCs included) lost their noney.
  - quaquaqua1 7y ago
    But clearly the money guys know best, because they would never act irrationally! /s
Gibbon1 7y ago
Reminds me of someone bitching about spending a decade developing a solid business and then a bunch of VC funded companies came like locusts, eating everything, and then promptly died.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  This happens quite a lot. There are some advantages to be had here if you play it clever but you better have a very solid play on how you plan on staying in business while the VC funded companies burn through their capital. At least you'll have a few opportunities to buy cheap Aeron chairs ;)

langitbiru 7y ago

What do you think about this startup: Lucid Drone (https://www.luciddronetech.com/ https://www.luciddronetech.com/)? They use drones for cleaning houses/buildings. It's a part of YC S19 Batch 2.

toxik 7y ago
Interesting idea, but ultimately drones are not strong enough to do what they want. It would need to carry itself, the tube, and counteract the force from the spray. Flight time is probably going to be way low.
- cma 7y ago
  As long as the spray is counterbalanced by a lower pressure higher volume spray in the opposite direction it doesn't need to counter it with throttle.
  - mhb 7y ago
    It still needs to carry the water. And water is heavy.
    - prometheus76 7y ago
      8 lbs. per gallon. Adds up quick in a water line.
      - scotty79 7y ago
        Or kilogram per liter for sane people. ;-)
        prometheus76 7y ago
        While you guys were sitting around coming up with your own arbitrary units of measurement, we were actually inventing the two biggest reasons why America is still on US Customary units: the milling machine (in 1816) and the profile lathe (in 1818). (Two other important inventions from America that also created momentum for our system was the steam engine in 1825 and the platform scale in 1830, but I won't go further into those.) Because the milling machine and the profile lathe were invented in America, they were built around the American measuring system, and accounted for America getting a head start in the Industrial Revolution. Those two inventions enabled rapid and consistent manufacturing of innumerable other inventions and tools at the time. By the time the Treaty of the Metre was adopted in 1875, America's manufacturing infrastructure was already 50 years old. The benefits offered by a decimal-based system of measurement were not and still are not significant enough to justify throwing out an entire interconnected structure of tooling, tools, and machines. I work for a custom fabricator (we focus on making highly customized one-off products that are either prototypes or highly specialized), so I have some insight into what it would take for just our shop to convert. We have milling machines that date back to the 1950s. They still work really well and hold tolerances as well as any similar mill on the market today. We would have to replace them and all the tooling that goes with them. Actually, we couldn't just get rid of them. We'd have to keep them and also double (at least) the size of our facilities to hold the new equipment. Why? Because we have long-term support contracts with many of our customers. That means we'd have to have two sets of equipment and two sets of tooling. Some of our contracts are more than 40 years old, so we would have to plan on having both sets of equipment for at least another 40 years. Also, we'd have to reprogram all our other CNC machines to work on metric units only. We also have to convert all of our drawings to metric, and many of those conversions aren't elegant. Try reading 38.5 millimeters on a measuring tape. Try marking it accurately and consistently. Now, I also have to consider that my employees now need to know two sets of measuring units, and be able to switch between them, because there's going to be a long period where some customer drawings are in US units and some are in Metric. That means that sometimes they'll make mistakes, because humans are very good at switching. So now I'll have more re-work and scrap. In short, we may be "insane", but while the SI countries were trying to figure out how to measure things, we were busy inventing and using the machines we needed to actually usher in the Industrial Age. By the time the metric system was finalized, we already had a 50-year head start on building things. Too late to switch. It will never make financial sense to change.

twic 7y ago

Sounds like something you could use a balloon for.

jmull 7y ago
A drone would give you control, when you want it. You could add drone-like control mechanisms to a balloon (or a balloon to a drone -- same difference, I guess), but that adds complications, so doesn't seem worth it.
asteli 7y ago
This is true. The neat thing about the drone is that you can deploy it super rapidly though. I haven't seen it done but I am imagining 30 seconds or so.

nradov 7y ago

A camera drone that follows you isn't a bad idea necessarily. It can actually produce some amazing video for action sports athletes. But of course that will only be a niche market.

SamuelAdams 7y ago
Why not apply this to vehicles? What if every car had a drone on the roof. Drivers could use the drone to look ahead and see how far ahead traffic goes, to see if that next exit really is worth taking. Or drivers could have it constantly surveying their vehicle, so that if a collision occurs, you have a bird's eye view of the incident, which is usually helpful. There's probably other use cases too.
- cbm-vic-20 7y ago
  A camera on a stick does the same thing?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- jve 7y ago
  Waze already answers if that exit is really worth taking in a much simpler way. Other use cases.. maybe.. but i'm not that excited that a drone follows most cars :) If a drone could bring your electrical vehicle some extra charge by docking on the roof and then going back to closest charger... well that would be a true value added feature.

btreecat 7y ago

Tethered drones are quite interesting. I fly one for our company but we have yet to get much interest in getting it adopted by first responders or LEO. The "unlimited power" comes with some major asterisk from my experience although it is with a different system. * Tethered power works great when plugged into a stable AC source, generators can be less than ideal. * Weather conditions limit your altitude even more so, higher wind requires more power to stay up. * The tether often works against a lot of the stabilization systems built into the drones, so flying them can be a handful under certain conditions * The tether can get bound up on the spool * The higher you go the heavier the tether is Overall though, it's awesome technology with interesting potential. I have kept ours in the air for over 3 hours continuously and only landed so I could take a break.

slowhand09 7y ago
Offshore racing sailboats use untethered drones frequently as there is rarely a helicopter available for publicity and action photoshots when 1000km out. I would think tethered would be great for them as they don't want to risk loosing a moneymaker with lots of potential remaining.
- mvid 7y ago
  Well if it goes into the water, tethered or untethered, it likely won’t be usable anymore
  - slowhand09 7y ago
    True, but in windy conditions, losing or leaving it behind might be a more likely scenario. Being able to retrieve it by pressing as button on a windlass or remote, then being free to attend to other things would be valuable.