The Drone Industry is shaping up to be an exciting one in
the US of A, even as the FAA (Federal Aviation Authority) rules are still very
restrictive as noted in my blog article
entitled “FAA's
Regulations for Drones - How UAS Benefit American Economy despite Restrictive
FAA Regulations by 2016”.
So it's not surprising to discover that Sony, a company with
no background in aviation, has decided to toss their hat into the ring as
reported in the article “Sony Is
Launching A Drone Business To Provide Data Services To Enterprises”,
published July 22nd 2015, by Jon Russell, Techcrunch.
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They've partnered with Japanese robotics and automation
company, ZMP, to form a separate company called Aerosense that plans to
official start business in August 2015.
Sony and ZMP from
Aerosense – Reselling Drone Services as Drones are everywhere
Strangely enough, they don't plan to sell Drones as noted in
the article “Sony
to Swoop Into Drone Market for Business
Customers”, published July 22, 2015
By TAKASHI MOCHIZUKI, The Wall Street Journal
but rather to offer Drone related services:
1. Aerial
Surveillance
2. Cadastral
Mapping Services
3. Plant
Inspection services
They'll be able to provide these services by leveraging the
power of their Cloud Servers and expertise in designing Camera electronics to
provide these cutting edge services. Thus they’d be doing all the heavy lifting
and taking the upfront cost of Drone ownership from the potential client.
This suggests that their potential clients may be Corporate
and Enterprise Customers; a few examples readily come to mind:
1. Agriculture
2. Construction
3. Mining
4. Oil
Exploration
5. Telecoms
6. Town
Planning
So is this a good business model? Initially yes.
But as Drone prices fall and Drone ownership in terms of
maintenance becomes easier among Enterprise and Corporate clients, they might
be willing to purchase Drones as well.
Sony and ZMP to
sell Drone Services - Aerosense makes sense if Sony Smartphone are Drone
Processor Boards
I suspect that providing a service was their original plan for
the Aerosense partnership. They might expand into the business of making Drones
as well.
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Google and Amazon are already making inroads into developing
autonomous Drones for package delivery as explained in my blog article
entitled “Amazon’s
Prime Air Patent – How Swarm Intelligence pilots @Amazon Autonomous Drones via
White Spaces Network with Call Center Agent Personal Touch”.
If they do, So would achieve greater marketshare by forming
a partnership with members of the Aerospace Industry as suggested in the
article “Sony
takes flight with Drone joint venture”, published July 22, 2015, by Don
Reisinger, CNET News.
This means partnership with such companies as such as Boeing,
McDonald-Douglas, Airbus and even NASA who have a Prandtl-m Drone in mind for a
Mars survey mission in 2020 as explained in my blog article
entitled “@NASA’s
Armstrong Flight Research Center Prandtl-m Drone – Surveying the Red Planet for
Human Colony as the More the Merrier with Two Drones”.
Google has already partnered with NASA along with Amazon to develop
a Low-altitude Traffic control system for Drones as reported in the article “Google
joins NASA and others to work on Drone Traffic Control System”, published
July 25, 2015 By Trevor Mogg, Digitaltrends
and “Google
Wants a Piece of Air-Traffic Control for Drones”, published July 24, 2015
by Alan Levin, Bloomberg.
For regular folks selling Drone modules based on their
smartphones that can then be programmed and be built into Camera Drones would
be more profitable as opined in “Sony’s
next big thing is camera drones”, published Thursday 23 July 2015 by Samuel
Gibbs, The UK Guardian.
This as there is more money to be made from selling Smartphone
as the processing board in a Drone as well as the replacement components than
the one-off sales of pre-built Drones.
Hoping to see Drones being designed by Aerosense in August
2015 along with their Service-based model!
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