(clicking) >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Denver, Colorado. It's our first trip actually to Denver for theCUBE, so we're excited to be here. It's DJI AirWorks show. It's the second show they've ever had, about 500, 600 people here talking about the commercial applications for drone. There's no conversation really about consumer stuff here, the spark is not here. This is really about commercial applications for drones technology, the platform, the software. We're really excited about the keynote speaker today. He's Michael Perry. He's a Director of Strategic Partnerships for DJI. Michael, welcome. >> Thanks for having me, Jeff. Absolutely, and great job on the keynote. Really enthusiastic crowd. I think you pretty much had their wrapped attention the entire time. (laughs) So before we get into today, talk a little bit about why DJI has invested in this conference, and kind of what are your high level objectives in doing AirWorks. >> Yeah, so over the last several years we started seeing more and more maturity in how people are using drones for commercial work. Ultimately what we found though, is that a lot of these conversations were happening one to one, and often they were coming to DJI to have that conversation and then we'd connect them to somebody else in the network. Instead, a year ago, we decided, why don't we just connect everybody together so they can have those conversations directly? And that was a huge success. We had end users, developers, and dealers all coming together to think about how we can push forward the future of enterprise with drones. And this year, it's even bigger. We've now included not just end users and developers, but also training companies and financial service providers, hardware providers. Everyone's coming together to look at what's the future of this industry and how we can push it forward. >> Yeah, it's pretty interesting. So really the high light of verticals if you will, so agriculture, energy, construction, public safety, and infrastructure, and of course media as well, but those are really hardcore industrial sectors where you've already seen a lot of pretty advanced solutions, and you're really pushing the solution messaging as opposed to the point products or even talking about the drones themselves. >> Yeah, that's right. So I think if we had this conversation five years ago, we'd be trying to tell everybody why drones are so useful. That's no longer the issue. The question is, how can we take these drones and operate them at scale? How can we move them from an R&D project where everyone understands the value proposition, but how can we make sure that it's able to use by the guys in the field on a daily basis? And that's what everybody here in this room is here to decide. >> Now you guys take a really interesting approach. You've really broke the drone up into pieces. So you've got the actual platform itself, the thing that flies, and you guys have spent a lot of time and effort in letting it fly itself if you will, really, with instruction. Then there's the sensors, whether that be a camera, the axsensors, infrared, all type. I mean Hasselblad is here, one of the oldest camera companies around. And then there's the software, and you opened up your API both on the mobile device side, the control side, as well as, sounds like this year, even giving the raw access to the most fundamental sensor data. So that's a pretty bold kind of path to choose. How did that go down, and obviously the results are huge. You're building an ecosystem across all of those units. >> Yeah, when we started seeing the applications for drones in the commercial space, we ultimately realized that we can't develop end to end solutions for every application for drones. It's just too big. So what we started seeing is, hey, look, there's a company that already doing fantastic work in GIS mapping. Let's just enable them to use our platform. And ultimately we're starting to look at how we can use the base core of DJI technology as a platform for other people to build on top of, to really expand the potential of drones. And that's true for everybody here in this room. >> So now you've got really a wide range of platforms if you will, but the other thing that you announced today that I thought was pretty interesting, and I'm relatively new to this space, but getting beyond kind of the one person, one drone concept, and really enabling an enterprise operation. One of the guys was up talking about their customer, Komatsu, says, we love it, can you put 20,000 of these things in the air for us? >> Yeah, that's right. >> So that's a whole different way to think about your aerial assets if you will. I think back to the early military days, right? We didn't have an air force, right? It was part of the army. But to actually now have the ability to have kind of an aerial branch within your business process that feeds into your other business process, a very different way to think about the world. >> That's exactly right. So FlightHub is the answer to that exact question. If I'm a business and I want to operate drones at scale, how am I going to do that? So FlightHub does multiple things simultaneously. Allows you to see the live feeds from multiple drones. Allows you to assign tasks to individual drone pilots. Allows you to monitor all of the drones in your fleet and see how are they performing, where have they flown, what kind of missions are they optimized for, and use all of that information to be able to operate drones across an enterprise. >> Yeah, and then you talked about the other side of the equation, which is, investors still concerns about safety and privacy and this and that. And you're coming up with another product that's really for law enforcement and airports and those types of people so they have a better view of what's happening around there airspace that they're responsible for managing. Not really for the consumers or even for the operators, but really for more of the control and the trust if you will within this bigger ecosystem. >> That's exactly right. One of the barriers to broader adoption is the perception of drones, if there's drone flying by, whose drone is that? What is it doing? Is it doing the thing that it's supposed to be doing? Is there an accountability mechanism? So with AeroScope we've designed an easy to implement accountability mechanism for law enforcement, for airspace regulators, and between the two of them, they can start saying, hey, look, there's a category of drones that can just fly and we can make sure that they're not flying in anyway that's effecting safety or security, and if they are, then there's a follow up mechanism. >> Right, right. Okay, so I got to ask you a fun question. Of all the crazy applications that the ecosystem has delivered, what are some of your favorites that either just seem, wow, who would have ever thought of that, or just really leveraging the power of the platform in a way that, again, you would of never thought of on your own? >> Honestly, every week there's a new, exciting application. The one that always brings to mind though is the Ocean Alliance had a problem in that they need to collect information about whale pods in order to assess their health and their diet and how they're faring. The best way to do that is collecting whale snot. >> Jeff: Whale snot? >> Whale snot. So previously-- >> Jeff: Who knew whales had snot? >> Exactly, so previously they would row in dinghies next to whale pods as they breach, try to collect the snot as they go up the spout. Now they're using drones to do that. It's much more time efficient, allows them to better assess the health of the whales that they're trying conserve, and it also doesn't put the researchers in harm's way. >> Yeah, it's bad news for what's his name with the dirty job show because-- >> Yup. (laughs) >> Really the drones are taking a lot of these dirty jobs. It's really a safety issue when you're inspecting. I talked to somebody over coffee inspecting oil refineries. You don't have to send somebody up a 200 foot tower anymore. You can send the drone, use software, and you can get a better indication than you could from somebody that maybe missed a spot. >> Yeah, you can decrease the amount of hazardous work hours and increase the efficiency. You can not only do the inspection faster, but I can do it more frequently and get a bigger data set so that you can take that intelligence and make your business operate a lot more effectively. >> Alright, so the goals for 2018. What will be talking about at AirWorks 2018? >> I think next year you'll see a lot more mature applications within the different protocols that you've just mentioned. There're already software providers and hardware providers trying to address them, but I think today you'll start seeing all of those solutions coming together into one platform that can easily be sold and easily scaled in these business. So you'll probably see a lot more players here talking about that. >> Alright, well Michael, again, congratulations on the show. Congratulations on the keynote. Exciting times at DJI. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Alright, Michael Ferry, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from DJI AirWorks. Thanks for watching. (clicking)

>> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're in Denver, Colorado at the DJI Airworks Show. It's about 600 people, talking about commercial drones. Nothing for fun, no film, no movies. This is all commercial, agriculture, construction, public safety and really excited to have someone on the agricultural side, it's Greg Emerick. He's the co-founder, EVP of Bus Dev for Sentera. Greg, great to see you. >> Yeah, thanks for letting me be part of this. >> Absolutely, so it's pretty interesting. I think a brilliant move by DJI to break the drone up into the platform, the payload, and the software which we kept hearing about over and over in the keynote and even the software, they break into the mobile software to control the thing, and then the actual software on the drone itself to collect the data. And you guys have a really interesting product. You have a different payload option, then what comes out of the box and what most people think of. So tell us a little bit about what Sentera's all about and how you use this capability to build your business. >> Sure, we're based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. We have a team of engineers, a long history in remote sensing. And so what we've done is, we've taken these sensors that we build, there are a multitude of different types of the ones that we build, and we integrate them onto different DJI platforms. We've engaged their software developer's kit and so we fly the aircraft with the mobile app. When the airplane lands, we pull the data out, pull it into our software, do the analytics on it and then push it into other analytics tools that are used for agricultural purposes. >> So what kind of sensors do you use? What are the sensors? >> Some of them are as simple as a red, green, blue camera, just a simple image. >> Alright. >> Other times, it's multi-spectral imagery. It could be near infrared or red edge that would be used for crop stress or maybe the opportunity to apply nitrogen in some instances We also do machine learning, and so we'll do things where we're counting plants, identifying the location of weeds in the field, and then pushing that into other tools or other implements that then could go do something and apply maybe something to the field, or do something to help improve the crop production. >> So how was that done before there were these efficient, small, and easy to operate drones? >> Manually, and then, there was a lot of interpolation, where someone would go out instead of we can count every plant in the crop and in some instances, that can be done if you have a really small crop. Otherwise, they're just sampling and it's not very accurate and there's a lot of interpolation between maybe six different locations in the field on 160 acres versus counting all of them. >> Right, it's pretty interesting because we've seen that time and time again in technology space. Now with big data, we have the capability to not sample anymore, but to actually take all the raw input and take action on the raw input. >> That's right. >> It's got to be way more productive than a sample. >> Right, and what we're doing is actually facilitating a lot of tools that are out there today. They already know how much fertilizer they've applied. They know what the soils are like. They know how much precipitation they've had. But they don't know the status of the crop. And so what they need is sort of this real-time opportunity to look at it, understand what might be a problem or maybe there's no problem at all, but in the end, they identify what they might want to do and then, from there, create an application or a prescription to go out and do something. >> Okay, and then, from your business model, do they buy a drone outfitted with your sensors, do they buy the sensors, do you provide this as a service, how does the business model work? >> Yeah, so for us, it's all about the sensor and the software and so a customer will come to us, and they'll typically buy a solution. We've taken the time and invested the energy to make sure that they function and operate on all of the DJI equipment. And then, from there, they'll purchase a solution and that solution will then be used for their own business applications. It might be at the enterprise level, or it might just be a big grower. And from there, they'll take the data and then push it into their analytics tools. >> And push it into whatever analytics tools they have. >> That's right. >> That's awesome. So as you turn the calendar to 2018, hard to believe we're through 2017, I'm still, kind of can't believe that. What are some of your priorities for 2018? Where are you guys going next? How do you see this evolving, as both the market matures for acceptance as well as the technology and some of the cool things they announced here at DJI today? >> Sure, well you know, of course DJI does great things and we continue to work with them. You'll see new sensors come from Sentera. You'll see tighter integration into the platforms themselves and you'll also see a lot more data that comes from them, and how they'll be able to be used in other analytics tools. >> Excellent, alright Greg, well, congrats to you and your business, it's fun. We hear about the ag application all the time. I stumbled upon on YouTube, a dedicated channel just for drones for rice farming, which I thought was fascinating. (laughter) Like, wow, I didn't know that was a thing. >> Sure. >> But clearly huge impact in agriculture. Huge, huge benefit to food production, farmers and ultimately more food for all of us. >> That's the motivator for us. I mean, that's what get us up everyday, so it's great to have someone understand what we're trying to do, so thank you. >> Oh, a pleasure, alright, he's Greg, I'm Jeff, you're watching the Cube, from DJI Airworks, 2017. Thanks for watching.

>> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We are here in Denver, Colorado at the DJI AirWorks show, it's their second show; about 600 people talking about commercial applications for the DJI drone platform. Really exciting agriculture, construction, public safety, no fun stuff, well, it's all kind of fun, really about the commercial applications, and we're excited to have Chris Boots with us, he is the chief engineer of Quadrocopter. Chris, good to see you. >> Good to see you. >> So we talked a little bit about what Quadrocopter does, and you're really into the enterprise space, these are not platforms that are generally available, you've got to get them through a dealer, they're expensive, they're complicated pieces of equipment, and that's a place you guys have been playing for a long time. >> Absolutely. For example, the Wind Series was unveiled today, the 4 and the 8; AirWorks 2016 introduced the Wind 1 and 2, and what these are, are basically universal platforms that allow customers to put various different, whether it be gimbals or sensors, it's kind of just a blank slate DJI product. That way you're not constrained to the limitations of an M200 or an Aspire or anything like that. When Quadrocopter began almost a decade ago, we prided ourselves on delivering custom-tailored systems to various different customer needs, so we felt right at home when DJI unveiled the Wind series. >> So really what you mean is it's kind of stripped down to its bare bones components so that you can design it at whatever payloads you want for the specific application, and they're also big, heavy lifters, right? We saw the agricultural one, I think it holds like two and a half gallons, 22 pounds of liquid, so these are also heavy lift machines, these are not little Mavics or Sparks. >> Yeah, precisely, yeah. If you need to lift something lightweight, there's the Wind 1. If you need to lift something extremely heavy, there's the Wind 4 and the Wind 8 which can lift well over 20 to 25 pounds of payload, so you're lifting some big stuff with this. >> So when you talk to enterprise customers, and kind of their journey into getting into and using a drone platform for their business process, how do they get started, you know, what do you see as kind of their first steps where people have some success and then you know, build into more of a fleet if you will, integrate it more to their processes? How do most companies get started? Do they say yeah this looks like a cool platform, how do we use it? >> That's kind of exactly how it happens. It just all starts with an idea. Most of our customers if they're not already existing UAS corporations and companies, they can be just somebody like you or I that comes up with an interesting UAV solution and you know, they do some Google searching, they do some research, they find something like this doesn't exist. Where do I go from here? So it doesn't take them very long to start making phone calls, and more often than not they call us at Quadrocopter, and one of my pet peeves is I don't like saying no to a customer when they have an idea, so that basically takes their idea, it takes our resources whether it be DJI or third party integrations, and making their dream a reality, so it's not always cinematography and cameras, it can be sensors or you name it, so yeah! >> So what are some of the more innovative uses that you've seen people use the DJI platform for that you would have never thought of, most people on the street would never have an idea that this is a useful application for this platform? >> Sure, well, I'll talk a little bit about the latest Wind application that we designed this year. We utilized the larger of the four copters, the Wind 8, which is an octocopter, and the client had the idea of inspecting methane pipelines. Now these pipelines need to be inspected every six months per governmental regulation. Currently, the only way that most companies like BP and other gas industries are doing this is by foot, by ATV, with handheld sensors, or on a large scale with rotorcraft like helicopters and people hanging off the sides of them, again with handheld devices. >> And what, they've got specialty sensors that they're looking for leaks and this and that, it's not really visual inspection I take it, or is it both probably? >> A lot of times they use either a laser-based or a thermal-based handheld sensor, so like a flare thermal camera. In our case, we didn't want to be constrained to the environmental influences that thermal can sometimes have, whether it's cold or it's dark or bright out, it can really skew the results, so in our case, it was our goal to find something that isn't influenced by the external environments. So we officially landed on a laser-based methane detector and paired that with the Wind 8, which then flies the pipeline route in 10 to 20 foot segments, comes back, and that data is used in mapping software to find out what the results were along that pipeline. If it is found that something is leaking, that file that is pulled off the aircraft will say exactly where it was, how concentrated it was at that exact point, at which point somebody can on the ground inspect that further. It totally gets rid of the whole safety issue of somebody on the ground or in the air and the expensive part of man power, of walking a pipeline. We can do it more efficiently, we can do it way more safer, and we get if not better results. >> The 10 to 20 feet doesn't sound like very long. Is that just because of, >> 20 miles. >> Oh 20 miles. You said feet. So it's 10 to 20 mile runs, then in parts they take the data and run it again. And what was the weight of that payload? >> The sensor itself doesn't really weigh much, I'd say two or three pounds. Most of the payload on the Wind 8 is actually the batteries. So the whole all-up weight of the craft is somewhere around 30 pounds. It's not extremely heavy, but for endurance sake, she'll fly for well over an hour. So at 10, 15 miles per hour, you can really cover some pipeline with battery to spare. >> So was that an initial trial for this customer, to try this solution? >> Yeah, this particular combination of sensor and copter had never been tried before, so it very much is an industry first in this regard, at least with DJI and the sensor. >> So where do they want to go next? I mean, it begs the question. The whole theme of today's keynote was like scale, no longer single operator, single machine, single data, but really starting to think in terms of fleets and multi-units, so is that somewhere where this particular customer wants to go, or how do you see it progressing for them? >> This particular client is a third party, so they aren't directly with BP, but BP often, I don't want to speak on behalf of BP, but a lot of gas companies outsource their inspection services to other different companies, so this particular land surveying company will use this and meet their demands of inspecting whatever section of pipeline that they're designated every six months. >> Yeah, that's great, alright, Chris, thank you for spending a few minutes, I mean that's a great case study and using the big heavy lift stuff, much more fun probably than the Spark! >> Absolutely, yeah, if you guys have any questions, hit me up at quadrocopter.com! >> Alright, he's Chris Boots, I'm Jeff Frick, you are watching the Cube. We're at DJI AirWorks 2017 in Denver. Catch you next time; thanks for watching.

(camera shutters) >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Denver, Colorado at the DJI Airworks conference. It's their second conference, about 550, 600 people. Really interesting, all about commercial drones. Everybody knows DJI for the Maverick Pro and the Spark and all their consumer stuff. But there's a whole industrial play and commercial play, enterprise play... We're excited to be here, these are really fun kind of shows 'cause everybody's into it and we're excited. Our first guest, Yariv Geller, he is the CEO of vHive. Welcome. >> Hey. Great talking to you. >> Absolutely, so what is vHive all about? >> So, as you mentioned, there are a lot of commercial users, enterprises, who want to use drones. And while it's really fun flying a drone as a consumer, enterprises don't really care about the fun factor. It's all about making stuff scalable, and autonomous. Now, we're taking it to the next level, so not just using a single drone. Once we've computerized a system that can fly a drone autonomously, we're actually looking at a swarm or a fleet of drones that are flying in unison. So, a user can define a mission, and the system will manage multiple drones that are actually collaborating on the same mission. Getting the work done much faster, any scale. Stuff that organizations really look for in an ongoing basis. >> So you're here, you know it's a DJI event... It's a really interesting approach that they've taken to break this thing up. You know, people probably don't think there's a platform. There's the flight platform, there's the payload, and then they opened up the SDKs. Not only in the controller in the mobile app, but also inside the unit itself. So, clearly it's something you're taking advantage of. Putting your software energy in, using the SDKs and leveraging that to create kind of a new flight pattern, I would imagine, and a new inter-drone communication system. >> Right, I think this is a very smart move that DJI is doing, we've seen it before. Take Apple for example, a company that builds wonderful hardware. And they said the best efficient way for us to sell this hardware is to create a platform where people can create amazing applications. So, they've created the environment and the ecosystem to support their wonderful hardware. I think DJI is doing the same kind of approach, where they say we have cutting-edge hardware that nobody else has. We can take this hardware to a certain limit with our focus, and then we'd like to develop an ecosystem around our platforms that can actually make use in different industries and take the applications forward. >> Right, so a lot of industries' really being highlighted at this show. Construction, energy, residential... You just had the Menlo Park Fire Department, next door to my house at home, talking about using it in security. So, for your application, it's interesting. Before we turned on the cameras, you talked about the distinction between a fleet and a hive... >> Right. >> And a swarm, excuse me, a swarm. Which obviously you think of bees, right? A smart swarm of bees doing crazy things. So, what are the type of applications that your customers are using your solution for? >> Right, so what we help customers do on a typical application is to digitize the field. Is to bring the field into the organization. So, if I'm a company who has large-scale field operations and it cost me a lot to send out people to the field, and actually understand what's going on, and bring piece by piece information inwards, this new domain of drones enables us to capture the field and to bring the information so the entire organization can view it very effectively. Now, one of the limitations that the industry is seeing is there's this paradigm of a single person, a single drone, which is kind of limited in scale. So, typically people will complain drone only has 20 minutes worth of battery. I can cover only so much, it takes me some time to do larger scale work. We're looking at this next phase. Of how do organizations actually cover more in less time, and more effectively. So, we work well with companies in infrastructure. wWich include civil engineering companies. So, not just construction where I focus on a building or a small area, but I want to look at an entire neighborhood, or a 15 mile stretch of road that's being constructed. We work with utility companies. So, we've done a lot of work with water utilities where they want to look at pipelines and infrastructure that they need to gauge over time. And they want to understand if there is an issue or a problem that they need to pay attention to. We work on infrastructure like cell towers and so on. Where instead of sending a person to climb up on a 200 feet tower with all the risk and safety issues associated and insurance costs. You can send a few drones to cover your infrastructure much more effectively. So, we're excelling in areas where scale is of importance, time is of importance, and costs. Which is everywhere pretty much. And I think one of the basic things that we say is very simple math. Throw a second drone into your mission, you cut time by half. You cut cost by half of being in the field. So, this scales up for organizations to do any kind of mission, any scale, any size, at half the time or less. >> Right, except you got to have the good software or else you start adding communication overhead and management overhead. So, it doesn't always equal one plus one makes two. Sometimes you have demission returns. But, just an opportunity for you. It's fascinating to me, this concept too, came up in the keynote earlier of taking physical data via the sensors on the drones. Whether that be photography or IR or... Lord knows what other kind of sensors you put on this. And really converting it into digital data that you can now almost treat as log data to feed into digital systems that we've been very familiar with in IT and manufacturing and other businesses. But now the drone becomes this interface between the physical world and the digital world in a space that's not necessarily wired. 'Cause it's new construction or it's a water pipeline. It's a really fascinating way to attack the problem and be able to apply analytic software, data-driven analytics to what was never... You couldn't do that before, right? >> Yeah, absolutely, and I think you're touching on a few points here that are important. First of all, in the end of the day, the drone is not the goal. The drones are the means, right? In the end of the day what companies are interested in is an acquiring data, processing data, and managing data. So that they can make smarter decisions in the end of the day. Manage projects and save cost and so on. So, drones are really enabling that. Another point that you touch upon, is drones generate a lot of data. So, every time we fly a mission for a customer, we're generating gigabytes and terabytes of information. And there needs to be a way to manage that effectively. Some of the organizations felt the pain, originally, by sending out drones and then piling up tons of information. And software solutions like ours generate the IT environment to manage all this data so that you're both able to drill down through it, link between it, and collaborate within your organization outside on that data. So, we're seeing, for example, companies in civil engineering, who both use the data internally for planning purposes. They use it to manage contractors in the field so that they can monitor what's going on from a bird's-eye view, and manage to compare between actual and planned activities. And they're also using it to manage upwards where they need to share information with whoever's investing in the project. They can show them actual progress, visual progress. Instead of sending them a written report, we're on track, check mark, and actually view progress over time. >> Right, right. So, as you look ahead to 2018, we're almost done with 2017. Is there any significant challenges, you know, that need to be overcome? Is it just people are afraid of 'em, is it privacy issues? Is it the software's still not up to snuff? Is it flight times and batteries? What are some of the, not giant challenges, but short-term challenges that the industry as a whole will be able to really address in 2018? >> So, first of all, the part of the industry that's our customers'... They're on this accelerating ramp up of adopting this new technology. So, we're seeing companies who have already identified drones as an excellent solution for them to acquire information from the field. We're seeing them starting to test out how they can use drones in making decisions that this is a good technology for them. And now they're experiencing some of the pains of how do you scale up. And I think, again this is a theme that we've heard today a lot. And this is probably the most immediate challenges. Moving from adoption to scaling up operations. So, I think we're going to see a lot of solutions that help organizations take drones to the next step. It's not just, yes we want the drone, yes we have a person or a group in our organization that's going to handle these. It's creating then their workflows and the infrastructure that lets them do this on a daily basis, in a repeated way. In a way that actually makes commercial sense, in terms of scale. And I think that's one of the key interesting challenges that we're going to see, as the industry grows from naissance to actual adoption. >> Right, well Yariv, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your time. Look forward to watching what happens at vHive, and a really exciting industry to be a part of. >> Thanks a lot, my pleasure. >> Alright, he's Yariv Geller, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from Airworks, in Denver, Colorado. Thanks for watching. (camera shutters)

(click) >> Hey, welcome back, everybody, Jeff Rick here with the Cube. We're in Denver, Colorado, at the DJI AirWorks show. It's the second year they've had it, about 600 people talking about commercial applications for drones. It's not consumer, this is not fun, it's not movie making, but really, all the commercial applications, in construction, in public safety, etc. Really excited to have our next guest. He's David Lyman, the Co-founder and CEO of Betterview. David, great to see you. >> Yeah, thank you. >> For people that aren't familiar with Betterview, what's your basic business? >> Yeah, so Betterview is a platform for inspecting buildings and properties using drones. We also pull in other forms of aerial imagery like satellite, aerial imagery captured with manned aircraft. But all of it is to be able to understand the condition of a property, the buildings on it, so that action can be taken on it, risks could be identified. >> I assume you work for insurance companies, underwriters, all types of inspectors who need some physical data to validate the condition of the properties. >> Yeah, that's right, we do both pre-loss and post-loss inspections for the insurance industry. We have a few other customers as well, but that's the bulk of our business. >> OK, then this is not a new business, right? We've had title reports forever and ever and ever. >> David: Yeah. >> How has drone technology, DJI specifically, kind of changed the way you guys operate, really opened up new opportunities? >> Yeah, certainly. When we started the companies three years ago with my co-founder, Dave, he was coming at it from his family's business, which was a commercial inspections business for the insurance industry. They send inspectors in the interior of buildings to identify risks like, is the life safety systems in good shape? Are the sprinkler systems, electrical panels, so on and so forth. But one thing that we're missing, and insurance companies kept coming back to them for, was better roof data. About 30 to 40% of the property losses that are paid out each year by the insurance industry are roof related. >> 30 to 40% of the loss is roof related. >> Yeah, it's about a 100 billion a year in total losses. >> Because leakage, or I mean, what are like the big losses that they don't see? >> I mean, replacing roofs is expensive. But also, you have loss of business, you have loss of contents, and so, yeah, when the roof fails, it creates a really big problem. When there's not enough information on the underwriting side, everyone's kind of taking market risk and they're not able to actually resolve problems before they become catastrophes. >> Jeff: Right. >> David tried out a few other things like roof poles and giving everyone a ladder, but that seemed like that there was, neither one of them really solved the problem very well. >> Because it's a classic dirty job, right? People fall off of roofs, they fall off of ladders. >> David: Absolutely. >> That's like really a big deal. >> Yeah, and it's time consuming as well. Then the drone has the ability, also, to get up there and take a lot of imagery very quickly. You're getting much greater amount of data to actually analyze. >> That's interesting, because some people say, can it get enough resolution? But I suppose on the other side, A, you can shoot a lot, but you can also get under the eaves and places where a physical inspector probably just can't cover every single square inch of the roof. >> Yeah, look, there's always cases where we still need to send an inspector out in a very small percentage of the time as a follow up, but the drone is just a great place to get started. We actually find that using aerial imagery even before the drone is an even better place, start there, because that's relatively less expensive. >> Jeff: Right. >> The drone allows us to get up very close, a few feet off the roof. We can identify small hail and other types of problems. Then if you find something that looks, that you can't quite get a full read on, then send out somebody to get up on the roof, and that ends up being a much smaller percentage of the time. >> Now, it's interesting, because you said you've got a whole portfolio of different visual tools you can use, from satellite to overhead airplane flights to drones to people. It's pretty interesting that you can apply whatever the right application is for the right problem. >> Yeah, certainly. I mean, we haven't always had, we've kind of, over time, added more and more data. We're really there to solve the problem of a lack of data around these buildings and properties. As we've continued along this journey, working with our customers, getting their feedback, we've been able to better solve the problem, and found additional data points that are helpful. But the drone ends up just being, especially as the drone's, the resolution of the imagery gets higher, the collision avoidance sensors allow you to kind of get close but not hit something, all that's really helping the drone be a more and more effective tool with every new release, every year. >> What's the biggest benefit, do you think? Because I can think of, one would be kind of accuracy of the mapping, because, obviously, you have software, you can make sure you cover every space. Is it efficiency that you could do more at a time? What is the biggest benefit of using a drone application in this long time historic business? >> Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, it depends on the situation, right. We have a big insurer of churches called Church Mutual, who, they have some very challenging structures that they inspect, right, so looking at the steeple. In that case, it's just, the alternative is getting a cherry picker up there, or, quite frankly, or not looking, right. It's just too expensive to take a look. That's one example there. When you have a catastrophe scenario, like a hurricane, in Florida recently, with Irma, the benefit is that you can see a lot of properties in the same amount of time that you had. That allows companies to process claims more quickly and more accurately. Then kind of generally speaking, what's great is that we capture such a comprehensive data set. We're getting really up close and we're capturing hundreds if not thousands of images of any property that we go inspect. That creates this record, that if there's ever a conflict in the future, you can deconflict the situation. We're actually trying to get our customers to be more proactive in using all that imagery and offering it up to their customers, the insureds, so that they can really understand why a decision was made. You're just creating more transparency. >> Right. A lot of conversation in the keynotes about autonomous operations. Obviously, DJI spent a lot of money, the things basically fly themselves, you're just telling them where to go. How much of your inspections are done with an operator? Or do you see a future where you basically point it at the building and it could figure out what it needs to do from there? >> Yeah, I mean, I absolutely see a future like you described, point it at the building and go fly it. Where we are today is somewhere in between. We started out purely manual flight three years ago. Now we have partially autonomous, partially manual, and very quickly getting to fully automated flight. What that does is just continues to drive down the cost of these inspections, which allows them to be done more often. The net, kind of where we end up in all of that is, you're just going to see a lot more decision making being data driven over time in the insurance industry and beyond around these buildings and properties than it ever has been before. >> Data driven automated software based decision making, >> Right. >> We see it everywhere. All right, David, well, thanks for stopping by. >> Absolutely. >> David Lyman for Betterview. Enjoy the rest of your show >> Thank you. >> And appreciate your time. >> Oh, hey, my pleasure. Thank you. >> All right, David Lyman. I'm Jeff Rick, you're watching the Cube from Airworks 2017, thanks for watching. (click)