Raphael
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http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a0cfd67a-6dda-11e5-8171-ba1968cf791a.html#axzz3omGgp7oh
Here’s an exercise for students of marketing. You are required to devise a strategy to make model aeroplanes sexy. You must also demonstrate how to build a global, multibillion-dollar business selling them. Not easy, is it? Making some other suburban pursuit fashionable — perhaps caravanning — might be less challenging.
There’s another minor obstacle to making remote-controlled aircraft rock; you have to reimagine model aeroplanes as sleek consumer products, despite their having lately been rebranded as “drones” and accordingly feared by millions of people as instruments of death.
All this renders the achievement of the Chinese drone company DJI more remarkable. Founded in 2006 by a mainland Chinese electrical engineering student, Frank Wang, in his Hong Kong university dorm room, DJI’s first fly-out-the box Phantom consumer drone appeared less than three years ago. Today, DJI is a global company with a valuation of $8bn-$10bn and more than 4,000 employees in China, the US, Japan, the Netherlands and Germany.
The DJI Phantom was a revelation, particularly to childhood constructors like me of made-in-Essex Keil Kraft balsa wood models with the uncanny knack of never flying properly, or, indeed, flying at all. When the £1,000 Phantom came out, it had been possible for a few years to buy a drone, but only for £20,000 or so, and with considerable flying skill needed.
Mr Wang’s invention, by contrast, was a breeze to fly, and practically impossible to lose or crash. The Phantom wafted around under your control, spookily stable and streaming video to your iPhone. If you messed up, it automatically returned to you safely. The stabilisation was Mr Wang’s secret sauce, turning an item for skilled geeks into a mass-market phenomenon.
The 1.2kg machine fascinated me, and not just because of the sheer, existential joy of piloting it and the astonishing footage it captured. It was the first ever desirable Chinese technology product. Not one of the first. The first. Trust me, I’d been looking in China for something truly drool-worthy and Chinese since I’d started visiting eight years earlier.
With DJI, there was no sketchy, half-baked early version, no unintentionally funny instructions. From the off everything was near perfect, from the design and manufacturing to the packaging to the website.
You could soon be flying your drone while streaming 4K video to a virtual reality headset, turning you, effectively, into a seagull
Indeed, the whole presentation was so flawless that until I had breakfast with some DJI executives in Hong Kong last month, I imagined that DJI was so slick it had to be an ABC — American Born Chinese — entity. Not so. The company and the products are wholly Chinese Chinese — a matter of pride to Xi Jinping’s tech innovation-minded government, I was told, even though Mr Wang is apparently determined not to allow its products to be used for military or state security purposes.
The impact of off-the shelf commercial drones — which is to a considerable extent down to Mr Wang — has not only been exceptionally speedy, but has proved a paradigm of human inventiveness.
Since the Phantom took off in 2013, drones have been used or proposed for: delivering goods to consumers within 30 minutes of ordering; delivering mail in the Australian outback; taking paparazzi photos; searching for missing people; getting aerial news footage; getting medicines to isolated African villages; staging political protest; planting forests in inhospitable terrain; infiltrating contraband into prisons; spraying crops; exercising dogs; acting as lookouts for criminals; dispersing chemical agents for terrorists; hunting in warehouses for bar coded packages.
This is just the start. I have heard serious voices suggesting that before long drones will live autonomously, avoiding all obstacles using ultrasonic sensors, repairing each other, reproducing, and hanging out in teams, migrating like birds to where they are most needed.
Too science fiction-ish, maybe, for a pragmatic Chinese business. But DJI is hardly standing still. The most exciting idea I heard in Hong Kong was that you could soon be flying your drone while streaming 4K video to a virtual reality headset, so the on-board camera swivels in precise accordance with your head movements — turning you, effectively, into a seagull.
Oh, and we’re talking next year, here, not next decade. As this age of continuous technological revolution keeps showing, innovation can be scarily fast — and not infrequently life-enhancing.
I, for one, can’t wait to be a seagull.
Here’s an exercise for students of marketing. You are required to devise a strategy to make model aeroplanes sexy. You must also demonstrate how to build a global, multibillion-dollar business selling them. Not easy, is it? Making some other suburban pursuit fashionable — perhaps caravanning — might be less challenging.
There’s another minor obstacle to making remote-controlled aircraft rock; you have to reimagine model aeroplanes as sleek consumer products, despite their having lately been rebranded as “drones” and accordingly feared by millions of people as instruments of death.
All this renders the achievement of the Chinese drone company DJI more remarkable. Founded in 2006 by a mainland Chinese electrical engineering student, Frank Wang, in his Hong Kong university dorm room, DJI’s first fly-out-the box Phantom consumer drone appeared less than three years ago. Today, DJI is a global company with a valuation of $8bn-$10bn and more than 4,000 employees in China, the US, Japan, the Netherlands and Germany.
The DJI Phantom was a revelation, particularly to childhood constructors like me of made-in-Essex Keil Kraft balsa wood models with the uncanny knack of never flying properly, or, indeed, flying at all. When the £1,000 Phantom came out, it had been possible for a few years to buy a drone, but only for £20,000 or so, and with considerable flying skill needed.
Mr Wang’s invention, by contrast, was a breeze to fly, and practically impossible to lose or crash. The Phantom wafted around under your control, spookily stable and streaming video to your iPhone. If you messed up, it automatically returned to you safely. The stabilisation was Mr Wang’s secret sauce, turning an item for skilled geeks into a mass-market phenomenon.
The 1.2kg machine fascinated me, and not just because of the sheer, existential joy of piloting it and the astonishing footage it captured. It was the first ever desirable Chinese technology product. Not one of the first. The first. Trust me, I’d been looking in China for something truly drool-worthy and Chinese since I’d started visiting eight years earlier.
With DJI, there was no sketchy, half-baked early version, no unintentionally funny instructions. From the off everything was near perfect, from the design and manufacturing to the packaging to the website.
You could soon be flying your drone while streaming 4K video to a virtual reality headset, turning you, effectively, into a seagull
Indeed, the whole presentation was so flawless that until I had breakfast with some DJI executives in Hong Kong last month, I imagined that DJI was so slick it had to be an ABC — American Born Chinese — entity. Not so. The company and the products are wholly Chinese Chinese — a matter of pride to Xi Jinping’s tech innovation-minded government, I was told, even though Mr Wang is apparently determined not to allow its products to be used for military or state security purposes.
The impact of off-the shelf commercial drones — which is to a considerable extent down to Mr Wang — has not only been exceptionally speedy, but has proved a paradigm of human inventiveness.
Since the Phantom took off in 2013, drones have been used or proposed for: delivering goods to consumers within 30 minutes of ordering; delivering mail in the Australian outback; taking paparazzi photos; searching for missing people; getting aerial news footage; getting medicines to isolated African villages; staging political protest; planting forests in inhospitable terrain; infiltrating contraband into prisons; spraying crops; exercising dogs; acting as lookouts for criminals; dispersing chemical agents for terrorists; hunting in warehouses for bar coded packages.
This is just the start. I have heard serious voices suggesting that before long drones will live autonomously, avoiding all obstacles using ultrasonic sensors, repairing each other, reproducing, and hanging out in teams, migrating like birds to where they are most needed.
Too science fiction-ish, maybe, for a pragmatic Chinese business. But DJI is hardly standing still. The most exciting idea I heard in Hong Kong was that you could soon be flying your drone while streaming 4K video to a virtual reality headset, so the on-board camera swivels in precise accordance with your head movements — turning you, effectively, into a seagull.
Oh, and we’re talking next year, here, not next decade. As this age of continuous technological revolution keeps showing, innovation can be scarily fast — and not infrequently life-enhancing.
I, for one, can’t wait to be a seagull.
