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DroneDeploy Conference 2016

November 8, 2016

I had the opportunity to represent Fulcrum at the inaugural DroneDeploy Conference in San Francisco, CA last week. One of the goals of the conference was to “focus on real-world drone deployments across industries driven by people”. The conference had people in attendance from an array of industries including end users, software providers, and developers interested in folding aerial survey data into applications.

drone inspection of cell tower

Also attending and speaking was Christopher Bartlett, Director of Technology for Utilities Services at USIC, the largest utilities damage prevention company in the United States. Chris talked about how they’re conducting infrastructure inspections using a combined workflow utilizing both the DroneDeploy and Fulcrum platforms. They’re experimenting with innovative ways to combine UAV surveying and Fulcrum to create total solutions for the utility and telecom market, for things like cell tower inspections (pictured above).

My main take aways from attending the conference:

The DroneDeploy App Market

The morning before the conference got going, DroneDeploy unveiled the DroneDeploy App Market. Their App Market enables users or partners to integrate drone data more seamlessly into different workflows. This announcement enables exciting potential integrations with other enterprise software platforms, like Fulcrum.

The App Market enables software developers to build apps inside of DroneDeploy that any user can take advantage of — and with our new APIs, developers can create integration points that augment their services with the unique power of the DroneDeploy platform.

We’re very excited about this announcement and are exploring potential solutions to streamline mobile field data collection + drone-based image capture workflows.

Incredible team, platform, and community

One common theme among seemingly every DroneDeploy user I talked to was how incredible the platform is. DroneDeploy works seamlessly into users’ workflows to fly and capture imagery, process and model the imagery, and then easily analyze, explore, or share it. Their team was outgoing, inquisitive, and knowledgeable. The conference focused strongly on relating-to and understanding the various use cases of the attendees & providing pointed conversations to discuss solutions. I believe it was a success and am looking forward to seeing the DroneDeploy team grow and announce even more exciting innovations in the future!