Commercial Drones FM

Sky-Futures, founded in 2009, is one of the oldest drone service businesses that exist. The company specializes in providing drone-based inspection services to global industrial enterprises.

James Harrison is Sky-Futures' CEO and has been with the company since the beginning. James and Ian speak about the demanding requirements of enterprise clients who request drone services, U.K. drone regulations, the drone hardware the company has used historically, and much more.

Intel is a global, multi-billion dollar public company and they have their hands in all areas of technology. As a legacy Silicon Valley juggernaut, they've found that innovation is key to survival.

Anil Nanduri, GM of the Drone Group at Intel, joins Ian to explain Intel's strategy around drones. From acquiring a multirotor manufacturer (Ascending-Technologies), a fixed-wing manufacturer (Mavinci), a computer vision chip manufacturer (Movidius), making their own entertainment drones, and even creating impressive technology like RealSense, Intel knows more than anyone how important it is to diversify and create a thriving drone ecosystem.

Airbus is a global aerospace company who have a wide variety of divisions and assets. Besides their airliners, Airbus also has access to a huge cache of up-to-date, high-resolution satellite imagery—so it was only natural that they create one of their newest companies, Airbus Aerial.

Airbus Aerial is a startup that, according to their website, leverages the most advanced aerospace technologies to collect and deliver only the data and services that matter most to your organization.

Our guest, Jesse Kallman, is the President of Airbus Aerial, leading the team to enable a future of digital services via satellites, high altitude, and small low altitude UAVs.

Drone Industry Review is a special, quarterly podcast series brought to you by Commercial Drones FM. It briefs listeners on the most important and newsworthy happenings from the previous quarter in the drone industry. Covered topics include drone hardware, software, regulations, funding, M&A, delivery drones, and how drones affected various industries in that quarter. This is the third episode in this series where we conduct the Drone Industry Review of Q3 2017.

AeroMana is a startup that provides tethered drone solutions. A drone that is tethered means that it is attached by wire to the ground, presumably to an external power source, giving the drone potentially "unlimited" endurance.

AeroMana's CEO, Jon Miller and CSO, Manuel Lombardini, join Ian to discuss how tethered drones provide unique flexibility for specific types of operations by enabling them to fly for hours, not minutes. Making all of that data useful is the next big challenge so AeroMana also provide proprietary analytics software for applications from sports to firefighting to surveillance.

The trio also explore the regulations around tethered drones and give their opinion on whether they should (or shouldn't) be treated the same way as non-tethered, "traditional" drones.

This episode of Commercial Drones FM focuses on aerial cinematography and the business behind it. Brian Streem is CEO of Aerobo, a nationwide drone service provider who claim to have shot more live telecasts than any other drone company in the world.

Aerobo operates drones internationally for their clients, working on the News, TV, Sports, Advertising, and Cinema segments of multimedia. They also provide inspection services.

Brian explains the ins and outs of high-end, Hollywood blockbuster drone cinematography, detailing what it's like to be working on movie sets for the likes of Steven Spielberg—and how much pressure there is to "get the shot". And pressure should definitely be expected when Aerobo can charge their clients anywhere from $6,000 to $15,000 per day.

Be sure to check out the podcast website to view two of Brian's coolest drone films, "At The End Of The Cul-de-Sac" and "CHROMATICITY".

Drones are incredibly useful in the construction industry. Giving construction companies the power to get high-resolution, aerial views of their job sites every single day and the ability to increase safety has undeniable ROI.

Todd Wynne, a construction veteran, nerd, and co-founder of Project Atlas joins Ian to deconstruct how drones are revolutionizing the way construction projects are now being completed. Todd explains how even though technology has advanced rapidly in the past 20-years, so much of the way construction is conducted today is still stuck in the past.

Project Atlas, the company, bills itself as a mapping engine for projects—essentially, Google Maps for the construction industry. Project Atlas is officially launching their service on October 9th, 2017.

To donate to the GoFundMe for the team using drones to map Houston in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, go to http://bit.ly/hurricane-drones

This is how a business with nearly $50 billion in revenue views drone technology. Cisco is a publicly-traded network equipment company, but its reach extends much farther beyond just servers and wireless access points.

Biren Gandhi is a Distinguished Strategist in Cisco's Corporate Strategy Office, focused on identifying key technology trends and accelerating their adoption through acquisitions, development, or partnering. And he's got his eye on drones.Biren and Ian discuss the future of connected drones and how these flying robots could essentially be boiled down to IoT devices which will soon be networked within a

Biren and Ian discuss the future of connected drones and how these flying robots could, in the future, essentially be boiled down to IoT devices that are networked within a blockchain, becoming just some of the active cogs inside of a distributed fog computing machine. Yeah, pretty amazing.

Biren Gandhi will be presenting at Drone World Expo on October 3-4, 2017 in San Jose, CA.

A skydiver, a Ph.D., and an incubator director walk into a drone podcast... This is the story of Genius NY, an unmanned systems startup incubator based in Syracuse, New York, and two startups that they've funded.

Genius NY director, Jon Parry, brings Jimmy Halliday, Aviation Director at AutoModality, and Sasi Viswanathan, co-founder of Akrobotix—both Genius NY portfolio companies—to the Commercial Drones FM podcast.

The group discuss how companies are winning millions of dollars by participating in the Genius NY startup competitions, what they're doing with their cash winnings, and how New York state is contributing to the proliferation of the commercial drone industry.

Cyberhawk, a Scotland-based drone inspection company, has logged over 18,000 flights and accomplished 25 world firsts with drones since their founding in 2008. The nine-year-old company has done the first drone oil rig inspection, wind turbine inspection, transmission tower inspection, and even the first internal chimney inspection.

Cyberhawk CEO, Chris Fleming, joins Ian for an uncut interview where the two dive deep into how Cyberhawk accomplishes industrial drone inspections for massive, global companies. Chris explains how using drones for flare stack inspections can save oil and gas companies $1.5 million per day in recovered production costs, showcasing how much is really at stake when providing services to their multi-billion dollar clients.

This is just one of the reasons that helps understand why, "if your hands aren't shaking, you aren't flying for Cyberhawk."