The Dawn of a new day for Drones

There has always been a vision for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) in cities and fields and industrial areas across the world doing the things that are challenging for humans to do. Some of it has been happening for a while now like automated seed dispersers in fields, disaster response and more. Thanks to Jeff Bezos kindling the imagination of many across the world with the public announcement of Prime Air, interest in the topic has been pretty high for the past two years. Today, a San Francisco startup, Airware announced the first enterprise drone platform which is a big step for the nascent industry.I am a big believer in the words of renowned venture capitalist, Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz that "Software is eating the world." As someone who helps build simple consumer and enterprise products that put smart software on commodity hardware, I can see the reasoning behind Marc's words. With Airware's new Aerial Information Platform, this statement echoes all the more true. It is no coincidence that one of Airware's backers is Marc's investment firm, A16Z.The Drone BusinessA bunch of promising startups like Airware, Skycatch, 3D Robotics, XAircraft and others are trying to crack the fledgling drone market with innovative ideas both in hardware and software. 3D Robotics for example offers a DroneKit SDK for app developers to build their ideas on.  Big players like Amazon, Google and Facebook are doing their own work on the use of drones to further their interests. In the meantime, the largest drone company in the world, DJI launched its latest model, the Phantom 3 last week. Suffice to say, things have never been hotter in the drone business.The Drone Operating SystemAirware's launch of their drone operating system can be seen as a cherry on top of the pie but also as the base unit that holds the pie itself. As much as there is innovation in the hardware used to make drones and the sensors and MEMS technologies, at some point, all of it will become a commodity and publicly available for a relatively low cost. When volumes pick up, which they will, the cost of drone hardware will start trending lower. The real challenge then would be to build a scalable embedded platform and a bunch of software API's to power a multitude of applications, unimaginable today. To be clear, this is not the first SDK for drone development and technologies. 3D Robotics has a DroneKit SDK that works well for their products. But what Airware is trying to do is to make it much bigger. Looking at what the platform promises, there is much to feel good about. The enterprise aspect of all this makes sure that drone commercialization and wide scale deployment happens fast. With GE as an initial partner, the kind of applications Airware will get to enable with its platform will make it an automatic candidate for many more.Also of interest is how Airware is charging for it. It is offering a licensing model for the Aerial Information Platform which indicates a drone platform-as-a-service model.What next?It is all about the applications. Apps and adoption are what make or break a platform. And the same holds true here. The more the number of farmers, the more the number of turbine operators, the more the number of climate experts who use the Aerial development platform and come up with creative and unique ways to use it to solve their problems, the broader will be the adoption of this platform and many more such.There are and will be challenges. Regulation is top of the list and FAA will take its time to approve the broader use of drones in cities across the US. But there is enough to be done while FAA is working through its list of questions. There are security aspects to be figured out. If a tablet or phone can be used to control these UAV's, what is to prevent a large scale hacking of that very communication thread. This could have potentially disastrous consequences.Battery challenges will also have to be overcome. More the data the drones need to collect and store, harder it is for the drone batteries to be small and lightweight. Backend cloud infrastructure to support real-time data collection and analysis in mission and time critical applications is an area of immense importance. Collision avoidance is always an area of interest which will become all the more important with more and more drones up in the sky at the same time.For Airware, 3DRobotics, DJI, SkyCatch and many others in stealth mode working on drone tech, this could be the moment when we stop talking about the specs of the drone hardware but start talking about the API's it offers, the apps it enables, the ecosystems it creates and the challenges it solves.