Woah! I finally got an interview with Ian Nott, the kid behind DR1 - the drone building company in Savannah. Thanks to y'all who forwarded me that article. When I finally got to talk to him he was really nice.
So, I don't transcribe interviews. But I do write out important quotes that I'll be using in the article. So here's the important quotes from Ian Nott, the man with the plan;
Ian Nott, UAV Entrepreneur
"Our mission is to provide very expensive, very technological UAV.. Before, like on a movie set, the director would have to hire production crews with high booms and even helicopters to get aerial shots or even use CG. We make the software to go on these UAVs to get shots that were never possible before. We also do a lot with the agro-industry and spectrum-analysis. Say if you're a farmer and there's a field of crops... a big field of corn, you can fly one of these UAVs over the field and, using spectrum-anaylsis, figure out if some sections of the entire field are a little water starved or maybe need fertilizer. Then the farmer can go out and make those adjustments. It would let you see certain areas instead of just looking at the whole field. You could also use our UAVs for inspection of roofs and towers. Things that people are risking life and limb for."
"our job is really to recognize the types of services that are needed. We provide the tools necessary to complete these jobs. We determine what goes into the craft by listening to our clients."
"When I first started it was with the cheap $50 or $60 toys. They give you an insight to how the UAVs work. I experimented with these toys and wanted to stretch my wings a little. I started building my own configurations and then I hooked up with SCAD and Volta-Collaborative."
"I use a DGI Naza controller, with pre-installed software. It's more programing and adjusting settings for what you need. It's not coding per se, it's adjusting values through a computer interface."
"Our Kickstarter campaign was designed to throw this at the wall and see what stuck. Honestly, it was an epic failure, but we learned so much. We then shaped what our company is, our direction and our value."
"So there's a couple other associates that I have but they're not paper-certified partners. There's me at the core and a huge ring of support including Volta-Collaborative. They're let me on as a sort of start-up accelerator. They use JetPack to analyze revenue options, competitors and the current market to make a direction of how to best spend the money."
"This was really born out of SCAD to foster some students who are more entrepreneurial with business ideas instead of art just for the sake of art."
"If you trace the history, it started when I got into the toys. The more I played with the toys the more I saw the high end stuff that was out there that these could be used for. I was doing really well on my own and then I hooked up with SCAD and Volta and it really took off."
"[Volta] are on the business side where I'm on the technology side, so it's really great."
"This is the next computer industry. We're the personal computers of the '70's and the next Steve Jobs has yet to come along to show off Macintosh. This is the next big thing in techonology."
"Scaling this business is one of our main missions right now. It's growing more and more every day. People are more and more acceptive and it's very, very exciting."
"There is the ruling in Colorado that declared open season on drones, meaning that hunters who are hunting deer have the right to shoot down UAVs. It's the silly, knee-jerk reaction of people who equate UAVs with Iraq, the military, spies and that kind of thing. But everywhere we go everyone we talk to is very positive. Whether it's an 8 year old boy to an 80 year old owman, everyone has smiles on their faces and thinks this is the coolest thing in the world. People connect UAVs with the negative, but when you're out in the field with a smile on your face talking about how positive it is, people get excited. People like it. If you compare our UAVs to the government drones it's literally liek comparing an RC car to a military tank."
AP picked up that story in the Savannah Morning Star and he said that he's seen his photos, with AP credit, attached to a USA Today article about drones. Gave us full rights to those photos. Said he would also contribute some.
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