Maybe this is a dumb question, but why is Techcrunch using a screenshot of Airwave's Slack channel in a news article about Airware ? Is there some connection between the two companies that I'm not aware of? Or did they just not bother to read what their "source" sent them?
Looks like it's Airwave telling their employees about Airware being shut down. You can see in the first message that someone is telling the channel that Airware informed their employees of the shutdown, and the rest of the messages refer to Airware as "they".
How do you go from opening a new office in Tokyo to shut down in 4 days? Unless literally no one is looking at the bank balance? Did someone log in this morning, see the balance at a negative, and shut down the company?
Usually when things happen this way it means that facts changed in some way. Either they presumed until today that some sale or financing deal would come through, or their investors met and decided they had had enough.
Yep. I've seen this happen to another startup. They leased a massive (for them) office space only to shut down a few months later after a funding round fell through horribly.
SV didn't lose to China; everyone lost to DJI. Their competence was staggering (I think they kind of slowed down lately being that they're so far out from everyone; throttling their innovation a bit). If DJI represents the future of Chinese corporations[0], many people on the other side of the ocean should be very wary. [0] edited from "products". In fact what's so impressive with DJI is not just the products themsel…
> In fact what's so impressive with DJI is not just the products themselves, but also the design, marketing and branding, which is kind of an Apple/GoPro hybrid. They are not just creating immense value - they are packaging it the right way. This is what always struck me as so short-sighted about Western corporations offshoring their manufacturing. Japan and the Asian Tigers proved that it's possible for nations to s…
Yeah, but that's the problem of the next CEO and not this one, and all the smart investors want to take anything they can get now and simply jump ship when they see something dark on the horizon. The only ones screwed are those with not much of a voice in leading the company, and/or lack of ability to move themselves elsewhere as easily as big capital can. I think they have all been acting perfectly rationally. After all, working "for the common good" is not anyone's goal, and according to the leading religion - or economic theory - that is perfectly alright and desirable, because invisible hand... I don't think keeping companies around for very long still is a goal of investors other than family businesses.
How do you go from opening a new office in Tokyo to shut down in 4 days? Unless literally no one is looking at the bank balance? Did someone log in this morning, see the balance at a negative, and shut down the company?
It's very traditional. The second you show that you're significantly scaling back you raise questions about whether you're a going concern. They could have canned the japanese office much earlier but then it's possible investors would say 'Hey, we thought the plan was to build strong links with Mitsubishi to prime for an acquisition for an exit, what's the plan now'. So the only real option is to push aggressively and hope it works out.
so it seems like Drones is one of the first big nascent industries, SV utterly lost to China b/c of their dominance of manufacturing?
SV is good at Software, UI/UX and, historically anyway, Silicon. But it can't do end hardware. And the stuff it has been successful at is designing consumer hardware but outsourcing the manufacturing to another country. Arduino is Italian. Samsung is South Korean. TSMC is Thai. ARM and RPi is British. Shenzhen is the hardware place to be now. It didn't even steal that crown from SV. It stole it from Akihabara.
Your examples make no sense. Arduino and Raspberry Pi are toys for hobbyists. Samsung is a colossal conglomerate that makes thousands of different consumer products. TSMC is a semiconductor fab, and ARM makes... specifications?
I know the article says Airware attempted to go into hardware, but did its operating system (ostensibly its main product) have users?
Nope, never did. We build 2 OS(s): the first was based on linux with a rtos package (2013-14?). That was scrapped and a new fully custom hardware package was built with a fully custom OS (built by a team that never had done this) and was built for a low power arm processor. We were plagued by huge issues most of the time due to that OS being nearly impossible to debug or work with. Also doing that prevented any third-party from building anything because there wasn't a SDK or even a platform to build on.
One other usecase with a lot of potential is inventory control and counting in warehouses. Not small articles, but for industrial warehouses and larger products drones combining bar code scanners and visual artical identification can improve things considerably. Fraunhofer ran some first test like two years in Germany. No idea what came out of it.
Does that really benefit from a drone vs a wheeled vehicle with a bunch of fixed cameras on it? I would think a gigantic planar environment is pretty much ideal for an industrial SDV; a lot of things get easier when you're no longer worried about weight— you can carry a full day's worth of batteries, not to mention having higher quality optics and safety lasers. (disclosure: I work for OTTO Motors, which has customer…
Why not both? A large, wheeled vehicle that also carries a small flying drone for the occasional inspection from above.
I know the article says Airware attempted to go into hardware, but did its operating system (ostensibly its main product) have users?
Nope, never did. We build 2 OS(s): the first was based on linux with a rtos package (2013-14?). That was scrapped and a new fully custom hardware package was built with a fully custom OS (built by a team that never had done this) and was built for a low power arm processor. We were plagued by huge issues most of the time due to that OS being nearly impossible to debug or work with. Also doing that prevented any third…
How do companies raise $10M+ without having a product ready to use? (Real question I run a startup that needs funding)
I'm not really surprised by this. At a drone conference in 2016, I first saw presentations from them among many other interesting technology vendors. They had a "vision" that they carefully presented on stage of what they would do, but everyone else at the show was either demoing technology or taking orders. Airware had a "call us for pricing" kind of attitude. Meanwhile, its been a year since Verizon acquired Skywar…
I think automated drone inspection may be a more profitable niche than it first appears. My school had a couple grad students start up doing NDT analysis with drones. There seems to be a lot of interesting problems that could be solved with drones when they are treated as a platform for specialized equipment. And the specialization in equipment and analysis is good protection against commoditization. But I do agree w…
NDT - Non destructive testing? So coupled with "specialised equipment" I assume something like scanning the steel in a bridge for corrosion? Is that feasible - the noise in any feed from distance / stability must mean "usual" specialised equipment cannot be used?