300ft Drone-Powered Hack Foresees A Future Stuffed With Eye-In-The-Sky All-Seeing Apps

▤ Summary

300ft is certainly that: a neat hack, built overnight at the TechCrunch Disrupt SF hackathon, which pulls in “close to live” aerial imaging from UAVs (aka drones) so the user can check how busy a prospective outdoor leisure location is before heading out. The hack team behind 300ft deployed a fleet of drones over “the most popular places in San Francisco” — such as the marina and the piers — to pull in up-to-date imagery (hours old, rather than a real-time stream) to flesh out their app. “Each image has time, geolocation and thanks to Weather Underground’s API weather data as well.” The 300ft app is a neat hack in another sense, neatly combining aspects of the work done by the respective companies of the duo behind it, McSpaddan and Bret Kugelmass, co-founder of UAV imaging service startup Airphrame — with the former providing the travel tech, and the latter company delivering the eye in the sky capability. Military tech does have a habit of trickling down into commercial products, so expect to see more apps leveraging drone-powered near real-time aerial imaging capabilities in the not too distant (but potentially slightly dystopic) future — especially as the cost of the necessary hardware continues to come down. “And then yesterday Bret sent his Airphrame crew out and they gathered a tonne of data [including the Americas’ Cup boat race].” McSpadden added that one possible use-case for a drone-powered app in the travel sector could be to provide hotels with an information service they offer their customers, telling them which beaches are the least crowded, for instance.

▦ Linked Companies

Airphrame

$1M to $5M