Mobitrends

Deconstructed by Kevin Rose

I’ve been wondering for some time now, following a conversation I had with Jordi Vallejo, how UAVs – aka Drones – will become available in the future to support non-military oriented use cases. There are already a bunch of companies providing civil drones, but those are still expensive 5keur+ and built by hand one-by-one… and they do not get very successful (those companies live on military budgets). On the other end companies such as Parrot with their AR.Drone have made the concept of UAV reach the masses with their cool toy, but unfortunately it’s really only a toy and cannot be used for other purposes. Moreover due to its high price and some intel I gather I think the AR.Drone is only a 100k-unit product with is very low for consumer electronics.

Yet civil drones have a wide range of use cases :

• Aerial photography (photographer, real estate, hotels, architects & construction companies, …)
• Aerial video (film industries, news, sport events, live events, …)
• Archeology
• Border control
• FirefightersInspection services (wind generators, smoke pipes, oil rigs, pipelines, …)
• Insurance & Reviewer
• Military
• Police
• Press & Media designer
• Scientific services (biologists, geodesists (GIS), meteorological service, …)
• Search & Rescue
• Security & Surveillance
• Special Forces

And those use-cases usually request expandable tools. If we take the firefighter case, they need to be able to get live update of a fire progress, yet when it’s windy they can’t fly manned copters, thus UAVs would be of high benefit to them to keep their ability to monitor a fire even in windy conditions.

Civil use case request also simpler controls (i.e. no complex remote) through a dedicated controller such as a tablet that would enable to basically pin the UAV to a point in the sky and have it hover around.

I’ve been wondering if it was feasible to make a sub 1000keur professional UAV that could be industrialized and it seems this is actually feasible. Below are a few renders of what it may look like. I’m now starting to wonder if I should push this initiative further.

“Open source hardware is hardware whose design is made publicly available so that anyone can study, modify, distribute, make, and sell the design or hardware based on that design. The hardware’s source, the design from which it is made, is available in the preferred format for making modifications to it. Ideally, open source hardware uses readily-available components and materials, standard processes, open infrastructure, unrestricted content, and open-source design tools to maximize the ability of individuals to make and use hardware. Open source hardware gives people the freedom to control their technology while sharing knowledge and encouraging commerce through the open exchange of designs”

Slide presented by Stephen Elop and Nokia CFO, Timo Ihamuotila, at Nokia’s Capital Markets Day.

I’ve been pretty critical about Nokia’s software over the past few years. In my opinion their last decent smartphone was the N95 an since then they did not release anything decent on the market – mostly because of their slowness to move to a touch-based HMI and the 20th century look of the Symbian UI.Likewise, Windows mobile has been causing pain to their users for too long a time. Never found anyone happy with their Windows Mobile 6 phones… While Windows Phone 7 may be engaging, Microsoft is still missing an iconic phone to actually mark the minds, just as the Nexus or Droids are for Android.

On top of that Microsoft maps is widely inferior to Nokia’s Navteq, and we know that one of the few features that kept Nokia phones alive is the Maps application.

This deal comes up as expected for some time now since Elop joined Nokia, and is leveraging on all the strong assets of each company to build what could be incredibly strong synergies. Nokia is loosing a lot though, since they basically publicly admit they failed at innovating on the software side, but they will gain the ability to build what can become the Windows Phone’s flagship device thus reinforcing the brand. On top of that this will enable Nokia to enter the North American market which they failed until now.
I imagine how the engineers at Nokia must feel about this deal – yet it’s probably the best thing that happened to Nokia over the past 5 years.

The big looser here is Blackberry since their OS is now the most old-fashioned of the pack…