Mike Winn is a co-founder and the CEO of DroneDeploy. The company was founded in 2013, originally to combat poaching. DroneDeploy is now a leading cloud software platform for commercial drones. Industry sectors they serve include agriculture, construction, mining, energy, forestry, and others. DroneDeploy customers get professional-grade imagery and analysis, 3D modeling, and more. Customers have mapped and analyzed over 100 million acres in over 180 countries.

Mike explains how drones have progressed from a novelty to an integral part of many business operations. Drones are increasingly becoming the future of work as they help industrial professionals remotely work, collaborate, and improve the safety of their job sites.

We talk about outsourcing drone operations versus using internal resources, and how they have become a simple to use tool that doesn’t require a specialist. Mike talks about the ease of data capture and analysis, and how the free Flight app can be used for flight planning and data collection that uploads images to an analytical engine for translation into a 3D model and map.

DroneDeploy finds that even though they support many different industries, a surprising amount of the technology is horizontal (cross-industry) rather than industry-specific.

DroneDeploy also operates DroneDeploy.org where they give free or subsidized licenses to organizations using drones for good.

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