a place in the mideast that doesn't exist that is where we get serendipity. >> that is great to know. >> how about here. i don't understand how those 200 girls in africa have been lost for three months and no one can find them, and the people who took them are using technology, and i don't know why they can't be found. >> yeah. that's a great question. i think there's a potentially a similar angle with the malaysian airliner where if people are trying to make you get lost, if human ingenuity is working at cross purposes to human ingenuity then you can get into an insoluble problem here where it's a remote part of nigeria and technology is being used

against technology. >> that was actually -- we had this conversation a little bit about some of the limits of kind of online activism or some people say hash tag activism. this ability of just masses of people to bring attention to these issues, right, and we talked about how that kind of bubbled up during the whole malaysian airlines hysteria where, you know, we all of a sudden started paying attention to these 200 kidnapped girls. the other analog is joseph coney, coney 2012. one of the most massive campaign we have seen in terms of online activism and it was all these eyes now focused on -- the whole premise was let's make coney famous and that will lead to some sort of capture, but still, as you say, coney is still out there, we haven't found most of these girls. so there are , as we said, limis to what technology can be,

especially if you have people trying to evade. >> it goes back to the basic human connections. the 200 girls in nigeria will probably be found because someone informs on them and tells the authorities where the girls actually are and someone decides to do something about it. it's like osama bin laden, too. for years and years the most hunted guy in the world but it's through human connections and people speaking face to face -- >> there was a technology angle, too. didn't they track someone's cell phone, too? >> it was finding the kouror, but once they had the courier it's about actually speaking to people and not texting them. >> yes, yes. this gentleman here i think has a question. >> a short anecdote before my question. i went camping in the desert one summer and i went to the bathroom during the night. i got completely lost. you learn about yourself when you get lost.

so i learned a lot about myself. >> and you haven't been to the bathroom since. >> yeah, yeah. i should have brought my phone. i'm alive still. a question between nature and urban getting lost. do you have a different mindset, philosophy when you get lost in nature and lost in a city? >> when i set out to do the getting lost series, i didn't want to die. my wife would have been upset. my editor would have been upset. i wouldn't have been able to file the story. they wouldn't have had to pay expenses but -- it's easy to get lost in the wilderness. it's very easy. i didn't want to go the easy route. i wanted to get lost in places where it was sort of technically hard to do that. part of that was i went -- the hardest place to get lost for me was a place that i had already been before. i tried to get lost in paris once. i have been there a half dozen times for various extended

trips. to try to get lost in a place you know really well, that you have walked across again and again and again.harder to do. i wouldn't recommend getting lost in the desert or the woods because i don't want any of you to die or get eaten by bears. yeah. >> but you come back with some great anecdotes which would be good. >> unless you die or get eaten. >> when it comes to getting lost in the wilderness there's really two parts. the first is not knowing where you are, and the second part is thinking you know where you are, and there's a fascinating part of search and rescue called lost person behavior, and people can act in very strange ways when they're lost, and you might see a lake and you think it's that lake you passed two miles back. it's actually a different lake, and this one has a boat on it and the other one didn't but you think maybe somebody bought a boat in the interval. there's an amazing case i read

about in the accidents in north american mountaineering. these people got lost and they came to a stream and they convinced themselves this must be the stream that leads to their camp except their camp is uphill and -- so basically they managed to convince themselves for some reason the river was flowing uphill, and they didn't know why, but it had to be because their camp had to be there and the river was flowing that way. i think that's the kind of -- when you're lost and you often find yourself in this kind of situation where like i know "a" and i know "b" and yet these things are mutually impossible, and you find yourself -- and that's when your stomach really sinks and that's when you know, oh, boy, my confidence is now waning because i actually -- there's a moment that comes. i don't know if it happens when you're in the city but there's a moment when you're in the woods and you generally have a sense i think i know where i am, and then oh, boy, this isn't where i

thought i was. >> several years ago when survival shows were just starting up on tv, the best one was "survivor man." the host would car around a sack of camera gear into the woods. it was miserable most of the time and he really had a good sense of his own emotional balance as he was completely lost in the woods or desert or the south seas and was terrible he was a great warning away from doing stupid things and he knew when he was doing stupid things. he would explain them to the camera. it was really good in that sense. he wasn't as cute as bear gryll and didn't have the sexy british accent so he didn't last. he survived. >> he was lost. >> i think maybe we have time for one more. front row seat gets it. >> yeah!

so something that i like to do from time to time is to go onto google street view and just find some obscure road somewhere on some continent that i'll never go to and just virtually drive around there just for whatever reason, and i wanted to get your feelings of virtually finding yourself in a completely unknown place in the comfort of your own home and how that compares to getting lost. >> i wrote a frugal traveler story on digital virtual staycations. you know, it's fun. it's fun. i mean, it's amazing that you can see these corners of the earth on google street view and on google earth. >> you can be underwater. you can be on an ice cap. >> it's incredible, but it's not

a substitute for the real thing. i mean, you can still go and make coffee. >> it's weird though, i had to go to pennsylvania recently and i got -- i like when i'm feeling paranoid to go and look at that weird turn because it's bare left. what does that mean, bare left? am i going straight or am i going left? and you can put yourself right gf before that intersection and see what it looks like and then you have that weird quasideja vu feeling when you're at this random county road in lancaster county and you feel like i've been there before. >> there's that weird guy in the red flannel shirt who is still there waiting for you. >> yeah, exactly. >> and it's weird, too, you probably noticed this, that you're here and it's summertime and then you go two feet further and it's winter all of a sudden. well, let's see. it's 7:44. should we pull one more out of the crowd and see if we can get

flummoxed? let's pick one from further back. the lady right here. >> with all the talk of like using technology to be found and that kind of stuff and to also get lost and i guess kind of -- was that me? i guess we have technology for everything, like literally for everything but now i think that people i guess around my age like in the 20s or something are starting to go back to like basics a little bit. the, quote, hipster movement or something like that. it seems ridiculous and seems like a fad, but do you think they're kind of reaching a plateau of how much we integrate our lives with technology or do you think it's kind of a path of no return? like are we going to do microchips or are we all going to start this reb sans of going back to basics and trying to find ourselves in places we don't know where we are and trying to do all this for ourselves, being prepared without having to google everything or is it too far integrated? >> i totally hear you and i

completely agree. guys wandering around williamsburg with handle bar mustaches and the maker movement. i think we're all feeling the same kind of nostalgia for real things and hand powered and a sense of connection because everything does feel virtual. you can start wandering around the world and feeling like you're in google street view all the time and not just for fun but kind of it's enforced. >> yeah. i think this is a really exciting time where -- in my lifetime just kind of we've gone from -- i remember being fascinated with the phone in the car to, you know, getting my first -- to beepers and then do the kind of upside down text on the beepers. and i think we're in this really kind of fascinating time right now where we just don't really know where we're headed and we are style kind of figuring it out. i certainly sympathize with that and i find -- and i often get yelled at by my girlfriend and

others, put the phone down, be in the moment and i do kind of desire that. i don't know to what extent -- i think we may find some sort of equilibrium with that but at the end of the day a lot of these technologies are designed to be really addictive and there is this kind of catch-22 is like the more we use them, the more they figure out like how to make it -- how to make the product more addictive, right? and so i think it's going to be as much as we may have that desire and we may find out, you know, 70 years from now these are like cigarettes when cigarettes first came out and everybody was doing it but then eventually you just learn like, hey, grandma, put the cigarette down. so, you know, i think it's a fascinating question. i don't know where it's going to end up at, but i do think we're in this very kind of like new kind of an exciting time right now that we'll find some equilibrium at some point. >> i think we're still pretty nascent. we're just now beginning the

whole internet of things movement where every part of you can be tracked and data can be collected so you're making the most efficient decisions about, you know, your consumerism or whatever else you might be doing. i keep actually talking to people about the idea that like the punk kids created straight edge where they don't drink or use drugs or any of that stuff that i'm waiting for the straight edge technology straight edge movement. maybe it's here. so it will be an interesting dichotomy to watch people try to hold onto that feeling of maybe finding serendipity without the aid of technology and balancing it with finding serendipity with the age of technology. >> i'll be the opposite end of that. you can't escape it. you know, the maker stuff is great. i think there's a ton of people

in their 20s who are returning to print media, who want to have something actual to hold, but that is in opposition to the overwhelming 95.999% of the rest of the world that is hurtling towards greater integration with technology. we're going to have devices in our clothes. not every piece of clothing but like your cool jacket that is going to play music and know where you are, be able to give you, you know, status updates on your -- on the wrist of your sleeve. that's going to happen. it's going to happen faster than anyone really expect it is to. >> and it's not going to be optional do you think? >> it's going to be so ubiquitous that the option will -- the option -- it will be the same as, you know, getting a custom made suit instead of just getting what's available everywhere.

every gap and old navy and forever 21 is selling this stuff that has technology integrated into it. that's everything. that's like everything, everywhere. >> we'll let you have the final word. >> i think both of you hit on something very interesting. it's like the technology is not just kind of this desire to be connected but also this idea of like optimizing experiences. so it's made us all kind of hyperaware of what everyone else is doing, what everyone else has previously done. and so there was this article going around recently around this restaurant, i think it was in new york, and they were looking at trying to figure out -- i don't even know inknow was a true article but it made sense. they've been trying to optimize their service over the past 20 years and they've been getting nowhere and they've been trying to do a bunch of stuff with their staff. and 20 years ago people would sit at the restaurant, look at the menu, order something and move on. the first thing we do now is sit

down with our phones. part of the reason is we go to yelp. we want to know what's the best thing to order right here. it's the same way like you said with travel. i'm going to spain, i'm going to barcelona, what are the two or three strauprestaurants i have visit while i'm here for fear of missing out those moments. so i think that that's another piece to it. it's this kind of am i -- my fit bit, am i optimizing my daily steps. should i take 22 more steps before i go to sleep. to your point, i don't know that it's a hard thing to try to put out of your mind because we're brought up in this world to try to be the best, constant improvement or striving. a lot of these technologies enable it. as much as we want to go back a little bit, i do kind of feel the same way. >> well, i can't top that. i think clarence summed it up as

well as it can be summed up. so let's call that good, and thank you all for coming, and it's been a great pleasure. thanks to my fellow panelists. [ applause ] today a hearing on retired ju. marine sergeant andrew tam ri si who was arrested in tijuana mexico on march 31st and remains detained in a mexican prison. the subcommittee will hear from the sergeant's mother and retired marine and talk show

host montel williams. live coverage starting at 10:00 a.m. eastern on c-span. tonight c-span3 in prime time features events from the new york ideas festival. we'll have a panel on efforts to include more minorities in the technology industry and the vp of langton on the importance of mentoring. tonight the first statewide broadcast of a debate between the candidates for the minnesota governor's seat. incumbent democrat mark dayton faces jeff johnson and independent hannah nicolet. our campaign 2014 debate coverage continues. tonight at 8:00 on c-span live coverage of the minnesota governor's debate between

incumbent governor democrat mark dayton, republican candidate jeff rodriguez, and independent party hannah nicolet. thursday night at 8:00 eastern, live coverage of the oklahoma governor's debate between state represent joe dorman and the incumbent governor, republican mary fallon. also on thursday at 8:00 p.m. on c-span2, the nebraska governor's debate between chuck has ebrook and pete rickets and saturday night on c-span at 8:00 p.m. live coverage of the montana u.s. house debate between john lewis and former state nor republican ryan zinke. c-span campaign 2014. more than 100 debates for the control of congress. next, a look at the expansion of consumer drones with a panel of robot and drone builders and software developers. this event was hosted by the churchill club in california. it's 90 minutes.

[ applause ] thanks, karen. and thanks to the churchill club for organizing another fantastic event and a ral fascinating topic. just a few words to kick off. our focus is on small drones. we'll talk about consumer, we'll talk about the enterprise space as well. and i think we can all recognize this is an area that is just changing by the day with just amazing potential. i was thinking, you know, as we were getting started, you just look at some of the things that we've seen from drone cameras in the past -- just this year. you know, it's given the world remarkable footage of the demonstrations in thailand and in the ukraine and a completely different realm it's enabled us to watch space x's grasshopper rocket, footage of that taking off and landing. we've seen amazon showing their vision for how our packages might be delivered in the

future. and as you've seen on the screens over dinner, just remarkable footage of the world around us showing us unique ways to view the world, and, of course, you've all just experienced probably likely for most of you in the audience your first dronee and they are the latest fads and they will probably be very old news in the world taken by eric, one of the world's best drone photographers. we're only just getting started on the drone journey. we have an amazing panel with chris, eric, and jonathan. in typical churchill fashion we'll start with everyone introducing themselves. so chris. >> i'm chris andersen, the ceo of through robotics. i was the editor of "wired" magazine for more than a decade and how i went from the editor of a magazine to the ceo of an aerospace company is a story we'll probably end up talking about, but let's just say back

in the media days i didn't have to run my own factory and now i do. so that was the hard part. the fun part is we get to put cameras in the air and open up a new frontier of imaging and big data and that's incredibly exciting. >> my name is eric cheng. i'm director of aerial imaging at dji. i sort of was on path in technology and i have a computer science degree or two and then i sort of fell off, much to my parents' disappointment and ended up being a photographer doing wildlife underwater photography for about ten years as well as some publishing and recently i have been sort of sucked back into technology and here i am. >> jonathan downey, the founder and ceo of air ware. i have been in the drone space for about ten years beginning at m.i.t., then later at boeing working on the development of large 6,000 pound fully autonomous helicopter system. was briefly an airline pilot

flying between las vegas and the grand canyon and really started air ware to address some problems that i saw as an undergrad at m.i.t. in developing a drone for specific targeted application. we build a platform. the platform is hardware, software, and cloud services that really power drones and enable them to be developed by other companies. so the one thing we don't do at air ware is actually build the drones ourselves. >> i'm christian sands, founder and ceo of sky catch. we build fully autonomous ground robots and uavs for collecting data. some of our clients are bechtel, clayco and they use the robots to collect data across all their job sites. our goal is to help all these companies with logistics, help them optimize process, safety, and we just finished our series a round and thankful to be here with you guys. >> that's great. thank you. obviously an amazing panel.

first question to chris. where are we today with the underlying technologies that make these small drones possible and where is it heading? >> sure. well, first of all we should probably define with a drone is, and we could probably all disagree. any robotics panel you will always disagree about definitions. i would say it's aircraft that are capable of full autonomy. they fly by themselves, they have gps guidance. it's not a piloted experience. it can be piloted if you want. we call them optionally piloted but by and large like any robot they do jobs that are dull, dirty, or dangerous, and they do it without human intervention. these two are both robots whether they look like it not. gps guided and incredibly intelligent. the reason this is possible, the reason that these two flying robots can cost less than $1,000 is essentially thanks to the innovations in our phones. i call these the peace dividend

of the smartphone wars, but basically they use the same components, the same -- the sensors, magnetometers, similar gp s, cameras. what's going on in your phones with the processor, the supercomputers essentially that are running the batteries, the radioed, et cetera, because of the economies of scale of the apples and googles of the world, these components just put in different packages can do things that were essentially impossible ten years ago and $1 million five years ago and now are less than $1,000 and will soon be on the shelves of walmart. >> from a photography perspective what are the advances you've seen and enable you to do the amazing footage we've seen tonight? >> well, you know, the ability for these things to be stable in space is something that photographers have been looking for for a long time. i mean, everybody who has had a go pro in the past has put it out as far as they can on a pole so they can get that hero shot

of themselves doing something they think will make them look cool. you sort of let go of the pole and the camera flies away and perhaps follows you. a lot of these things are happening sort of as we sit here today. every week there's a new development out or a new company trying to do something like that. and so for the creative pursuits, these things are opening up something that we couldn't really have -- well, we dreamed about. i was going to say we couldn't have dreamed about them but i dreamed about this ten years ago and i thought, if only i could have a flying camera and now we have them. >> just one other thought on that. for all of human history we've been basically stuck. our perspective has been stuck at eye level and now for the first time in history we can see the world the way the birds do and without the skills necessary, without having to be in the air which is dangerous. without having the skills of flying something. cameras can now be positioned arbitrarily in space and the question is now that you have the boom of spielberg, the crane of a spielberg for free

essentially, what are you going to do with it? >> right. jonathan, you're obviously attacking the space in a different way. as we look at that arc, why are you going off to the space that you're going after specifically? >> photography is a really interesting application and i'm equally excited about it. at air ware we believe that drones are going to be used for such a wide variety of different applications, everything from agricultural to infrastructure inspections, inspecting power lines, pipelines, bridges, levies, oil derricks, land management, anti-poaching operations. some of these of which we're involved in now. we really think that to address such a wide variety of applications, you need a platform so that companies who are developing a drone for a specific application aren't either leveraging a black box solution they can't meaningful extend in hardware and software or they're not having to do it all from scratch and develop all of that themselves. they can focus on the pieces of hardware or software that are really meant to be

differentiated for their application. >> christian, you're addressing a number of challenges in the case but specifically battery technology is one you're doing some unique things around. can you talk to us about that? >> yeah, our strategy or our vision is not as exciting as some of the stuff these guys are doing as far as filming kite surfers and all the cool stuff. we work with miners and construction people. early days try to figure out how to make their jobs more efficient and more productive, and so early days i spent a lot of time just in the field trying to figure out if it's actually useful for them. after a lot of weeks and months, i discover that it was. you know, ran into a couple of people, one superintendent once said, he's like at any given point at this construction site there's at least 100 questions in people's head today that can be answered just by seeing

something, and if they see that, they can answer that and move forward. basically what he was say something i can shave days off construction and those are millions of dollars. so that really -- that was really what motivated me to start the company sky catch and our biggest challenges today in technology that we're solving with, you know, with these partners is basically completely automating the experience of the uav, making it fully autonomous when it hands. making it fully autonomous when it swaps a battery, when it sends data to the cloud so you're not involved in the process. >> battery technology. how long can a drone three for -- fly for on a battery? >> we spent a lot of time optimizing how much electricity was sent to the motors. we've optimized our drones for the size, the props, the motors, so we get about 35 to 40 minutes with high wind time in the air, and our average missions are

about five to ten minutes and cover a large amount of area. so, you know, the idea behind doing -- swapping the batteries because the batteries haven't evolved in ages and it's not going to evolve anytime soon. some company that is are doing interesting things with batteries haven't been tested. they haven't gone through the rigorous test of making sure the battery is safe. right now today most of us are buying batteries that have been thoroughly tested by great companies and they've been mass produced for hobbyists. >> right. so battery technology is one of the things that obviously is being addressed. as you kind of look out over the next few years, the pace of development in the drone space seems to be so rapid at the moment. what are you guys looking at as kind of the next wave of developments that are going to enable sort of new use cases

with drones? chris? >> this weekend three pfollow m projects launched. follow me is one of these things where the drone follows you. you're biking or skiing or running, whatever, and the drone just stays back 30 feet back and 30 feet up and keeps the camera focused on you and gets that kind of perfect cinematic hollywood view. that's -- on one level that is exactly what the youtube generation wants and it's incredibly complex artificial intelligence, autonomy function, using gps and i mage recognitio spotting you and creatively trying to figure out what's the right angle. looking at the sun and the shadows. this was science fiction a few years ago.< f1 o this is the droid you were looking for and this was just this weekend there were three project that is launched and one of them just raised a half

million dollars in a day all based on our platform i hasten to add. that was just today. tomorrow this mapping function we're talking about, so what christian is doing is, you know, is this notion of construction. construction is arguably the number two industry in the world, agricultural is the number one. so what this $300 copter can do is a one-button mapper. it goes around, does circles around a construction sight, takes pictures, gets sent to the cloud, in this case auto desk, and creates this 3-d model. you then -- that 3-d model gets snapped onto the cad model the engineering company was already doing and you get -- and it's happening every day in automated fashion thanks to the recharging stations and you're the client and you want to know what's going on at the construction site. you can drive to the construction sight or watch on the cloud, watch your building snapped onto the very cad model

you approved, watch it building up digitally -- digitized. there's nob bs. that's a $300 copter. >> you're talking about technology that's deployed actually underneath or on the drone. you're not talking about the drone itself. in terms of the actual mechanics of a drone, are we going to see much development or have we reached the point now where -- >> so we talk -- so the model of the company is from the camera to the cloud. right now we're using a go pro-eric is using a custom camera. it's even lighter and smaller and more highly controlled. we're all moving towards bringing the sensors down -- again, the peace dividend of the smartphone wars are the camera sensors are getting incredibly good. we control the camera, the vehicle, the communications link, the ground stations.

then you control the cloud, then you have big data and these huge render farms. and so the drone itself is just a vector to capture data and transmit it to the cloud where sense is made of it. >> what are you thinking of where the world is heading? >> the internet sort of enable a lot of the drone activity as well. if we didn't have internet it wouldn't be as interesting because we're sharing all this data through the internet. so everything basically just came to at the same time and sort of going back to what chris said, a lot of it came from the smartphones. all the innovation allowed for all the pieces to be really affordable. >> interesting, you mention about the incident. eric has already posted the dronee, it's already on instagram. if you find it under eric, you can retweet it. one of the other areas that's the peace dividend from development we're seeing online is extensive use of open source

software but also open sourcing the hardware designs. i know that in speaking to you all, although. >> you're in separate companies you seem to be collaborating around the common code, common designs. >> it's one area i have a different perspective. the open source projects are really exciting. it's certainly what got myself in the space and a lot of the people on our team. i think as the testimony of applications broadens and as the drones are going to be deployed above people's homes and flying around people's heads, i think safety and reliability are going to become kind of more and more pair are r.ramount in this indu that's an area open source is likely to struggle in and that, you know, if we look at the model that most people use on their phones, most of the applications specific software, the feature that is all of these startup companies are building their business models around is developing the apps themselves. less around kind of getting into

and modifying the android colonel, if you will. >> and christian, you've been -- i know you've been using some of this open source. >> yeah, i'm using three robotic source and we've forked it last year working closely with them to make modifications to make it fully autonomous, to do all the landing technology we had to make modifications, work with them on some of the -- they have a vast community of people working on software, so it's easy to get access to people working in different parts of the source code. but we basically -- we couldn't afford to do our company and also work on autopilot. so having that sort of available to us was extremely helpful. >> and, chris, what was the thinking behind going that route. >> the arc of history is pretty clear. linux is the most secure operating system. there's a reason why the internet runs on linux and not windows. i brought this up here for a

reason. this is not actually our copter. this is not our drone. this is a chinese drone made by a company connected to hobby king. they improved it. it's a derivative design but i don't mean to be pejorative, they improved upon it. you know, we've got 20 years of open source experience. if you're using android, if you're using chrome, using firefox, using linux, you get it. open innovation with all -- with more than enough eyes, all bugs are shallow. i think this is proven, this is the silicon valley way. we have our own drones out there which we would like you to buy, but if you'd rather have something cheaper, if you'd rather have something white that looks like a phantom, here it is. it works great and we did nothing to make it happen. we put the code out there and the world used it. >> let's shift gears to another topic. i think all of us when we were outside seeing the dronee being

shot by eric and watching chris do his mapping exercise, well certainly i was slightly stunned by the skill it takes. so, you know, you guys are the professionals and i know that there are some people from accenture who are also in this space. it takes quite a while to learn how to pilot these things. how difficult is it to learn to fly one of these things and to control them? >> do you know how to push a button? >> i'm going to ask eric first, then you, chris. >> let me first talk about how most people are using these today. so they're still essentially manually piloted. they're autonomous in many ways because they hooverer by themselves which is nontrivial and the directions are not throttle up, it's really go up. they're high level instructions. go in this direction. we'll watch that command set move up higher and higher as the technology improves. so what most people are experiencing now is that it's

very easy to put one of these things in the air and to do something simple. and the rest of it, unfortunately, right now is totally based on your personality. if you are very careful, meticulous, and you have a goal and you know how to get there, you will probably be very successful immediately with these things. but if you -- maybe you race motorcycles on the weekend or you may end up crashing one of these things because it does involve -- if you're piloting it for creative purposes, you're moving that camera around in space and you need to have right now you need to have feedback. you need the controls to respond in a way that lets you feel like you're connected to the device. so i have flown this phantom without touching the radio using the apps. you say go here, here, here and come back. and that's fulfilling because it actually goes there and comes back. but while it's going there i'm controlling the camera and trying to be creative in that way, and so i think there's always going to be that component in the creative space of someone who is directing

these sensors around in an interesting way. so i think the autonomy is always -- in our space in the consumer imaging space is always going to be tied to some amount of manual interaction and that could be perhaps programmed in for repeatability. i can imagine a director, you know, telling it where to go and then having someone else push the button and you do it 20 times, the same every time. so i think it's a complicated question. they're very easy to use but to do something at a very high level with them right now, it takes quite a bit of skill. >> and christian, you're adopting is more autonomous approach. >> right. so our focus has always been the data. so we're using these tools to get the data fast, retrieve it fast from different places, and be able to actually allocate these robots in places that, you know, conditions are very bad, where there's cold, really hot, and so, you know, most of our projects if you go to some of

our client sites are not very interesting. you know, mines in the middle of the desert, but it's extremely valuable to them to be able to have something that gives them this ability and keeps them safe or creates volume metric measurements on a stockpile where they usually send people on top of them. in terms of our technology, we sort of, you know, we used to tell investors is it's almost like, you know, in a world where you have no bikes and we basically had photographers that needed to go around construction sites really fast, we created a bike for them to get on it and go around but our focus is not the bike. our focus is the data that's coming back to us. >> right. >> so through creating the bike, we mixed creating the wheels and we use some of chris' products to create the handle so it directed the right way but our focus has always been the data. >> and how is that sort of autonomous control evolving, jonathan? in your platform you're looking

at supporting and controlling multiple -- i believe multiple drones. how is that playing out? >> i think the level of autonomy is certainly going to end up being very related to how safe and reliable the systems are. if you look at people and companies who have operated these for thousands or hundreds of thousands of flight hours, of course, all of that is in the military and a very significant portion of their losses are all related to pilot and operator error, and so as we develop the software to make the aircraft highly autonomous and as you mentioned put things like enforced work flows in place so that there is somebody who can create a mission, somebody who can check and make sure that's a safe mission, and maybe someone entirely different who is going to actually operate the vehicle by driving their van out there, hitting go, and flying the vehicle where data processing and kind of generation of analytics and insights may happen completely differently and kind of as part of the cloud. i think a lot of that is going to be part of what makes these systems more safe and reliable

to operate as well as things like the development of algorithms that can take into account where the other vehicles are located, whether they're cooperative aircraft or noncooperative manned aircraft who are part of the same air space system i think are all area that is we're working on development. >> that's going to be really big. that's something on everybody's mind. how to solve that very efficiently without using a lot of power. >> your colleagues actually are doing something there. are you going to introduce them? >> i'm not going to because i'm pitching accenture tonight. >> if you poke around you will see cameras and interesting -- >> there's some interesting demos and examples where we're working with a variety of different clients. turning back to this topic though, i look at a control like that and i don't really know how it works. i suppose -- as you look at this

evolving are we going to have to get certified. it will be like getting a license to drive the car? >> back in the day you always had a certification to be a hobbyist. i used to fly fixed wing and i was certified and you had to pay. i think all of you probably are certified hobbyist. today it's sort of kind of gone away. you can just fly them yourself. you don't have to have a certification. before you used to go to a certain spot to fly. now you can just fly anywhere. i think we're going to -- you know, jonathan had a really great idea in terms of the faa. i think they should establish something where they force people to set up some sort of considerati certification. i think that's a phenomenal idea. that will keep people away from doing crazy things. >> i think we should expect that the faa is going to be looking at certification in two ways which are the same two ways they look the certifications of operations of manned aircraft.

one is the certification at the level of a director of operations at a company who is operating drones. this is the person who is responsible for everything that happens before the drone takes off. training of pilots and operators, maintenance of the vehicles, putting the right processes in place to ensure that when that aircraft takes off, it's a safe and reliable aircraft and the person who is responsible for operating it is going to operate it in a safe and reliable manner and then the second piece of that is the actual operator of the vehicles themselves. they'll need to be trained, certified licensed likely in a way where that person knows the responsibility that is essentially in their hands even if it's the case that the aircraft is fully autonomous and what is in their hands actually is nothing but air. somebody inevitably will be the responsible party for operating aircraft in a certain area. the other interested party is insurance companies themselves. right now about 1 in 50 to 1 in

100 companies that is seeking insurance to operate drone aircraft is actually able to get that insurance underwritten, and so the insurance providers and the underwriters of the insurance are going to play a very key role as well in establishing what some of the processes and procedures, how some of the aircraft are designed, what some of the software that's powering them is. it's really going to enable and determine how and where these aircraft can be used and for what purpose. >> chris? >> at risk of being a little -- i mean, really, this in this costs $299 on amazon and you're going to need a certification to use this? it shows up under the christmas tree. do you really think the faa will require this bit of plastic which -- parrots is going to be coming out in november. it's going to weigh about a pound maybe. it's all foam. it's going to be the hot toy. it's going to be fully

autonomous, everything you described is going to be a toy under the christmas tree. it's going to be the hot toy this christmas. faa certification? >> so i know the panel is consumer drones but somehow i got invited anyway. so certainly our focus is a little bit -- i'm happy to expand the focus. a lot of our focus really is different. it's on kind of enterprise commercial applications of which some can be addressed with kind of a very small camera from your cell phone. there's a lot of other application that is require carrying of larger equipment, larger camera systems, multispectral, hyperspectral cameras, carrying of systems where we're actually taking air into the aircraft itself for doing analysis like air quality and looking for certain particulates in the air. there's applications where -- so there's a wide variety of applications that many of our early commercial are addressing where the absolute minimum size is two pounds or not they're definitely regulated. one of our early customers delta

drone operating regularly in france which at this point has the most mature regulations as well as probably the most mature commercial drone industry in france right now and all of it is regulated, and there's actually a very good process in place by which delta drone can submit paperwork, have it faxed, i know it should be all online and electronic but they can do that within 24 to 48 hours prior to flying the drone for a commercial operation. >> so let me ask, what's the status of regulation with drones in the states at the moment? >> i think we're all on the same page that, you know, our number one priority is safety. i think chris could reason that, everybody. i think that's the same thing that with the faa, they're focused on safety as well. it's just that i believe in my opinion that they're not equipped today to deal with this sort of challenge, and, you know, obviously we have all sorts of different types of ideas, certification, get law enforcement involved, some sort of technology that detects these guys flying around so see how

high they're flying. it's going to be a very challenging thing to tackle, and i think that the faa is going to have to step back, collaborate with -- >> we're here in silicon valley. we've seen this picture before, right? so there was telecoms and the telephone companies were regulated, but the computers weren't and then the computers were connected over land. and then that was the internet and then it's like, oh, wait, we actually don't know how to regulate this anymore. and same with personal computers which kind of had this bottoms up revolution. i think what we see is time and time again you see white spaces. you know, the world says, oh, well, it's 2.4 gigahertz, it's wi-fi, you can't possibly destroy the phone networks and we do amazing things with wi-fi. gary knows this better than anybody, gary in the audience has invested in many of these. the silicon valley model is to sort of take the small, the sort

of under the radar, the grassroots, the bottoms up and add more functionality to it. so under two pounds, you can do amazing things under two pounds. these things -- there's no reason why they can't have multispectral. they can have radar, sonar, all the atmospheric detection. if two pounds is the limit, it's fine. >> it's totally arbitrary. i was going to point out you see this product and this product but on both sides of these product you can pretty much run forever and see products on both sides. i kick started a project that lets me control a paper airplane with my phone. is that going to be regulated? it's possible but probably not. wherever that line is drawn, you will see hundreds of products under whatever that arbitrary line is. there's two lines here. the weight and the capabilities of the aircraft. historically hobby -- i'm actually not certified because i came to the game much later. >> i'm not certified. >> from what i understand it's a

voluntary guideline issued. it has nothing to do with what's legal. it has to do with what's its users -- the rules which the users are willing to adhere to. that's what we're really looking for is a set of guidelines perhaps voluntarily adhered to by this community. the rest of it is the message that these things are here and are not going to go away and we need to be responsible about how we use them. >> i think hobbyists role i used to fly fixed wing back in '94, and not that old. but used to be engines, used to put gas on them and it was a small community, you know. it wasn't, it wasn't like today. where everybody is hobbyist. everybody can buy a drone. typically you got the same news, the same updates, things weren't

shared on facebook or twitter. it was just you looking at this thing, you know. things changed dramatically when it comes to the guidelines they put together way back when. it doesn't fit the landscape today. >> it's interesting. i funded the paper airplane as well. i don't imagine that's going to be regulated. can we turn to camera technology, eric? that's the world that you're focused on. how is that evolving? i mean, when are we going to see 4-k sensors on these devices and what's going to be possible? >> a year ago if you were to buy one of those with the goal of putting it in the air, you'd be buying something that would carry an existing camera. in many cases the gopro, because it was the smallest quality payload you could put on this thing. this product, this is the phantom 2. this is what i shot that droney with. you notice it has what looks like a lens on a stabilizer.

on a mechanical stabilizer. this was the first product in this space that really -- we decided to split the camera and to stabilize and unstabilized portions. there is no reason to stabilize a button that is used on land. to start and stop the camera. what you want is a very, very robust, stable sensor and a lens. this is the direction- i have been flying these and other ones that carry bigger cameras for a while now. i much prefer the way these handle. luckily a camera is a camera and they all have the same parts. if you take away the parts that are required for use when you're holding in your hands, it is still a camera with the same capabilities. you just control it from another device. these cameras are going to hop on the same curve the normal cameras are on. we know that the gopros are going to be proper 4-k with the high frame rate very soon and you can expect this to happen. it's going to happen this year.

all of these essentially will be 4-k flying cameras. >> will the cameras -- two, one with a separate camera and another with an integrated camera. how is that going to evolve? >> personally, i don't feel like the separate camera has real-life in this game. because you can't do anything with it. yes they're opening up apis over wi-fi and bluetooth and cables to let you control things. but ours is fundamentally designed to let you control it from the thing you're carrying in your hand. >> i think you mentioned power. they're adopting a different approach on camera technology? >> yeah, so both of these are mechanically stabilized. they have these motors and gumbels and sensors, and they kind of do this. paris with their next generation copter is digitally stabilized. which is to say the sensors have so many pixels that you can put a fish-eye lens in front of it,

and then move the sort of rectangle capture around the sensor, so quickly, that it achieves all the stabilization is mechanical without any of the weights or complexity. so it basically is just a little -- looks like just a lens. and as a result, because you're reducing the complexity, the copter is smaller. it's cheaper. it's saecher. it is probably not good enough for the kind of cinematography you do. it might be good enough for most people. >> soon it will be. >> more's law is a wonderful thing. >> and weight's. weight's absolutely critical. so the -- >> the fastest route to safety is lightness. these things are dust, if they're basically you know dragonfly size, shape, weight, et cetera, then no one, at that point the whole regulatory question goes away and it's ridiculous. these can't possibly hurt anything. >> on the ski slopes we see people wearing the gopros. when will we see people with their own personal drones?

not how following them down the slope? >> next week. what you will see is one follow the skier into a tree. that is what's going to happen. none of these systems have any kind of sense and avoid technology. my response was actually not entirely positive. it was positive in that i love that they exist but it is negative because i feel like the people who buy them and use them will be disappointed because they are expecting magic. none of the videos were shot with products that actually follow you. what objects they're shot with piloted -- maybe yours is. if you're on the ocean and you're on a yacht, that would be perfectly great application. but in the real world on land you have things that stick up, you know, and it's unfortunate. they'll have to fly very far away from those, much higher and then there's a question of how you retrieve them. you have to time your run pretty well so when you're at the bottom you still have battery

life so it can come back to you. maybe these will be like blocks in the future. >> the beautiful thing about it. there's a lot more people thinking about it today. smart people are trying to solve that. there's going to be a lot more people trying to solve this a year from now. it will get to a point where it is extremely reliable. i talked to huge companies trying to figure out how to collaborate and solve this. >> let's flip to sort of commercial use of drones. christian, question for you. where are drones, you've given some examples of use cases. but you know, where is the in for drone technology? what is it really good at doing and where does it create value for commercial organizations? >> this is my own opinion. i think this is something chris said, as well. we are going through this phase where a lot of the focus is the drone itself.

just like the computer era, everyone was focused on the computer. then everyone was focused on the operating system. then they focused on what software applications you build on top of the computer. there's no new computers today. it doesn't make sense. right? that's going to go away. it's going to be more focused on the practical things of how people are using and extracting out of the drones. so that's going to -- next year is going to be all about all this really cool stuff that people are doing with drones that are practical, that are adding value. and eventually in the future, i read an article about how they are planning on using drones to mars and the moon to map mars and figure out if they can put a jet engine on it and map it out. people are going -- you're going to see a lot of this application five years from now. there's going to be a lot of innovation. we have been able to get this far in just such a small amount of time.

five years from now, all of this innovation, smaller, cheaper, far more reliable. all of the software is going to be far more reliable. batte battery's going to be far more reliable. so the opportunities are incredible. we had someone ask us if we could build one to clean windows in high-rises. people are creative out there. people building platforms like chris and jonathan will be able to provide for these different rare cases that people are coming up with. >> some of the examples you give are aligned with improved safety, so you don't have to expose workers to risk. but also increasing productivity. you're getting straight to what you need to do and not worry about the safety. and setup. i mean, some of these cases, i know, that you -- >> for us, we're using some tools that these guys are building to collect this data. we're teaching all of the industry how to use this data. we spend. some of the projects we're working are fascinating.

i'd share some of them with you. we sit down with construction workers every day and they use images on top of the screen and draw circles on top of it. they print them out. we have 100 to 200 people using our images at these very incredible sites. they print them out, take them out to the field and someone lost something in the middle of the field and we launched the drone and created a new map and were able to find this item they were looking for just by looking at high res images. so that's just collection of data and being able to see things right away. we want to go beyond that. we want to detect things on the ground, alert people, the crane move or the panel took five minutes, construction site was three years. then you analyze the data to tell you exactly what were the pinpoints, what were the areas you could have improved on.

the piles were depleted, not fast enough. all of the things are going to be tracked. two weeks ago we had a construction site where they found a stockpile being gone and the contractor came back to recharge them for the stockpile and they were able to use the images and say, you took this pile away and then they brought it back. they were able to catch those guys and recharge them and they fired them. but that's sort of accountability didn't exist today. >> you're also putting different sensors attached to these devices. what are some of the creative -- you were mapping. that clearly wasn't being done entirely with an image sat white. >> that was just a gopro. software does amazing things. it takes these images and those future recognitions, stitches it together. the big picture here is that we like many other industries, are digitizing the world. we have the ability now with this kind of more's law of sensors, cameras, satellites,

drones, camera phones, we have the ability to now measure the world around us, bring this into the internet, the cloud, and start to make sense of it. agriculture is a great example. that's an open loop system. you plant, you wait six months and you hope for the best. why don't we know what's going on? because the farms are too big. because we can't walk the fields anymore. you know, because we don't have enough maybe, you know, to do that. what if you could digitize farms. what if you could close the loop? what if you could, you know, figure out that we don't have to spray pesticides today, because we don't have a pest infection. we don't have a disease outbreak. how do we know that? because we digitized the world. let's not spray chemicals until we have to. that's just one example. essentially these things look like toys. >> let me ask a a question. jeff bezos when he was talking about the drone delivery of amazon, and i don't want to speculate, said it was four to five years out from being a reality.

why is it four to five years out? what is going to happen and change -- >> we wrote a blog post about that. i mean, safetywise, there's so many things that they haven't thought about. you can't have a prop, you know, uncovered prop thing flying into your front yard with kids around it. there's things that chris and i talked about this. a lot of things these guys need to think about before you go in to that world. >> there's a lot of technical challenge that come into play between delivering something from a drone from point a to point "b" and point "a" and point "b" are always the same, to delivering from point "a" to maybe thousands of amazon lockers, to delivering from point "a" to everyone's household. including apartments and including homes and including anywhere else people may be asking for deliveries. so, the broad scope of that picture, i would say, is likely far, much farther than five years out. and may in some cases and some areas likely never be possible

from a regulatory standpoint. but maybe applications where some things being delivered from a known area to a known area i think are some of the applications for delivery we're going to see first. some of our early customers are researchers at m.i.t. who have a bill and melinda gates grant to demonstrate the delivery of vaccines and medicines and areas of africa and southeast asia where the place you're delivering to is a known quantity and the place you're leaving is a known quantity and the case is a life-saving scenario so there's a high motivation to make sure this happens. >> that's another thing really key working with autopilots. knowing your weight. you can't have a variable. it complicates the autopilot. so carrying things, it needs to be a fixed weight in order for it to be efficient. >> you mentioned the social good aspect of drones. i would be interested to hear

more about those examples of where drones are doing social good. >> given that we're building a platform so we're focused not on a single application but all at the same time broadly on a lot of applications. one of the things we did early at air ware is took a wall and started writing all of the different things on the wall that we thought drones were going to be used for. we came up with a lot of the common commercial ones that we talked about here. then we also kind of had a section of the wall where we wanted to come up with some of the things that we hoped and we wanted to see drones really used for. we came up with wildlife conservation, and aerial delivery of medicines. and those are two examples that we have been involved in since. >> any other -- >> one of the interesting requests we got early days, walmart found us through angie's list of all places and they asked us if this is something

they publicly talk about. they do, they use satellite imagery to figure out how many people go to the stores. but they want to take a step further and find out how many people go to the stores based on their ad campaigns or their commercials on tv, right? so being able to map that and correlate that based on -- i did this ad campaign and 30 people showed up at the store. globally and regionally, it's huge. another person was talking about the satellite company that just sold to google, how they're selling imagery around all the manufacturing plants in china that are apple manufacturing plants where they can tell if they're manufacturing a new apple phone. because they see the trucks going in and out. right? so they're selling this data to different people. you can see how valuable that can be. >> we have got like five minutes before we go on to q&a. let's talk about the business opportunity, where the money is.

i have seen predictions by i think whose company is actually in the audience tonight, around the drone market by 2025, driving almost $100 billion of economic value, the faa saying in a couple of years there are going to be 10,000 drones. at the moment -- >> 10,000. we see more than that in a month. >> i was wondering why the faa is coming out with a number that's quite so low. maybe they're talking about bigger ones. but where is the value today? how is it going to evolve over time. there's money in hardware today. >> so it starts with hardware and quickly becomes data, services, so right now they are a a way to get sensors. what you do with them is a big opportunity. we think that we make our money from hardware. we're essentially a software company. we're happy to have other people make the hardware. we -- you know, at the end of the day, nobody cares about the drone. they care about what it can do and whether that's video or still or pure data.

like everything else in the valley, it turns to a cloud service. >> going back to what chris said, what these guys are doing is enabling the public to sort of like what uber did for anybody to be a driver. right? they're doing the same thing. you can be a real estate agent and have a drone and fly and provide sort of services to people that you couldn't -- you couldn't do before. be a search and rescue person with a drone and utilize these drones to find people, you know, with the data and all of that. the amount of things that are going to show up in the next three to five years are going to be unimaginable today. >> so the value will accrue to services, data, it won't accrue to the hardware space? >> i think -- >> satellites are a precedent for this. climate corporation is a great example. climate corporation said hey, we'll take the data and sell to farmers.

and the farmer said, i don't know what to do to the data. so their credit, climate corp went back and asked the farmers, what do they want? the answer was, well we got this variability in our crops. we'd like cheaper crop insurance. so they tooked the data and turned it into actuarial analysis that allowed them to ben rate better crop insurance and became an insurance company and sold for a billion dollars to monsanto. >> i can't wait until the day when drones are boring. because i don't really -- i've been using these every day for a number of years and i still get excited because they fly, but it's just a tool. when 50i78 i'm using these, i'm not thinking about the drone anymore. i'm thinking about what i'm doing with it. i don't care about it. it's just the thing that can get the camera somewhere or a sensor somewhere. you see that in most people who use these things a lot. and it changes a little bit. if you're a sport flier and fly fast the technology is changing fast enough so that you're always interested in what's

coming out. i'm interested in flying longer, flying more safely and getting better picture out of it. i don't think very much about the other features of the drone. >> you're seeing that with journalists, too. journalists are getting bored at just reporting drones. >> this is about robotics in general. robots are things that don't work. the moment it works it's a dishwasher. you know, and i can't wait for these things to turn into dishwashers. they do a job. who cares. i'd love to take the word robotics out of our company name. 3-dr.com, by the way. and it's just like -- who cares how it flies. it flies. discuss. >> our perspective, and i think chris mentioned earlier, the cost of the hardware is coming down every so many months. we have the viewpoint that just consider the cost of the hardware free. if all the hardware were free tomorrow. where is the value. the value is in the software. and software specifically that requires fewer people on the

ground to operate the aircraft. that software that enables you to operate in a fully autonomous way. software that allows you to decrease the risks associated with using the technology. software that helps you be compliant with whatever the regulations are as they are coming out and what the insurance requirements are. so really software and then the purpose of all the software, the big giant multinational companies who are interested in using drones. they are not interested in using drones at all. they are interested in the data that they can collect by using drones. drones is just one type of data collection mechanism. in many cases these companies already have some way to get the data but they're doing it from the ground where it's either personnel intensive, dangerous, overly costly, or very time intensive to do so. where any of those things can be decreased by doing it from the air. >> great. >> let's have some q&a. we've got microphones.

>> two questions, first, is there any definitive website or publication or something where drone people go periodically. so if somebody wanted to issue an rfp for a particular drone, there's a new drone company every week so they wouldn't know who to send it to so they could just post it there. that's the first question. second, how will the new faa rules get made? is there going to be a proposed rule making and what's going to prevent the bozo factor. for example, having a two-pound limit on drones to me is kind of dumb because you could get killed by a one-pound drone falling out of the sky. and so what would make sense to me is kind of a harm factor. what is the terminal velocity divided by its hardness. you know, a 20-pound styrofoam

drone would do less harm. >> interestingly that's actually how france looked at the regulations. so they actually have a number of total joules of energy that your aircraft can have. i think one of the biggest problems in the united states actually is that congress mandated that the faa come out with regulations and from the onset said that one of the dividing points is 55 pounds. that's actually really unfortunate. what they should have done is they should have said to the faa you come up with regulations that you think are appropriate. and the faa would have likely looked at this problem and said 55 pounds does not make sense as a dividing line. what may make sense is two pounds or five pounds or a certain number of joules of kinetic energy. and it's certainly the case that in other countries like france, they have dividing lines at much lower weight classes than 55 pounds. >> the way to think about it is is really there's the manned air space territory which is 1,000 feet and up, and unmanned, below

1,000 feet. above 1,000 feet, what you're worried about is plane to plane collisions. what would take down a jet liner? 55 pounds would definitely take down a jetliner. would two pounds? that's sort of bird sized. depends on materials, et cetera. but you kind of say, if it jet engine ingested this, would that be a terrible thing? that should be the limit. below 1,000 feet, now you're talking about running into trees and telephone lines and children and that kind of stuff. and there you have, you know, different -- there you're talking about personal safety and i totally agree i don't want two pounds landing on my head which is why i'd like to have this down to about six ounces. >> the other thing that exists at lower altitudes and 1,000 feet is manned helicopter flights including search and rescue, police, as well as life flight flights. they are almost always below 1,000 feet. helicopters are more efficient the closer to the ground that they fly. especially in agriculture, crop dusting, within the last two years, there's been multiple incidents of small unmanned aircraft nearly colliding with

crop duster aircraft. a two to four-pound aircraft is a large obstacle to hit at 70 miles an hour in a plane that only weighs 1,000 pounds. >> the question is what is the right sand box? 83 feet happens to be a number arbitrarily in the law. 83 feet was some chicken farmer back in world war ii decided that airplanes flying below 83 feet were scaring his chickens. so 83 feet is not regulated. whether that's enforceable or not. so you just tell me what the number is. 6 ounces, 83 feet, whatever. i think we can innovate around that. >> and the question -- [ inaudible ] >> there's a committee called rtca -- >> the question was how are the rules going to get made? >> part of the process is there's a subcommittee rtca 228 in which there's both people from the faa as well as several industry companies who are involved in coming up with part of the process, and proposed rules, later this year.

the faa is supposed to actually release with their proposal for the rules will be which won't take effect until next year. and that's specifically for smaller unmanned aircraft. >> the other question is how did you keep up to date? on the specs, like is there a -- what's the forum that you're all -- that once you go to, is that really yet -- >> we sit on rtca 22 we also sit on the astm standards commit which is tasked with creating the act. so once rules are in place, what are the standards, your hardware and your software have to comply with in order to be used for commercial operations. >> should we answer the next question? >> also, news, patrick is here somewhere, there he is in the back. that's where i go. suas news, he collects a lot of breaking news about this space. and then unfortunately in the consumer space if you're interested in hobby flying, you have to go to the forums.

they are not very friendly. a word of warning. >> there's a couple of c-spans where the head of the faa talks about the challenges of setting up the laws. one of the biggest challenges in this is we have a lot of relationships with the faa as well is working with law enforcement. working with cities. how are they going to enforce these laws. and it just becomes extremely expensive if you start thinking about having these guys flying around and police having to be responsible for enforcing these things. you'll see courts filled up with people claiming that they didn't break the laws and have no proof. it's definitely a big challenge on that end. we are sort of tackling the private space area, where a lot of these companies that we're working with have insurance for things falling off the sky. they have hard hats. and they are massive companies.

bectel, for instance. they're sort of having -- they're pro-active at working with the faa to figure out a plan of attack with them, rather than trying to circumvent them. >> next question, please. >> i'm eric cline. chris, you made a great comment which is that we're digitizing the world. hi, over here. we're digitizing the world. and my question to the panel is about privacy and ownership, which is what happens when i digitize my neighbor, or what happens when i digitize my competitors and/or valuable data. how do you guys look at that going forward? >> i get this question a lot. the first thing is that a lot of people just are not aware of what the faa regs already are. flying over your neighbor's backyard is illegal. it's banned by faa regulation, whether it's a law or not isn't a matter of debate. you can't fly over populated areas. so anybody who is flying over your backyard is essentially in

faa violation subject to a cease and desist. and $10,000 fine. privacy aside, and privacy in the united states is incredibly fragmented because it's based on a community standard, reasonable expectation of privacy, which varies from region to region. so we have something like 80 city and town, you know, legislative processes right now to try to figure out, and privacy is also a moving target thanks to traffic cameras and facebook, and camera phones, et cetera. i think that least in the united states, where we don't have a kind of monolithic privacy rule, as they have in europe, it's going to be solved more on safety purposes rather than privacy. because the one thing we can agree on is we don't want that thing flying over our backyard, whether it's taking pictures or not. >> any other comments? >> i would just say there's a lot of existing tort law in the space as well around privacy. in many cases flying over your neighbor's yard and taking pictures is more of a civil case than it's going to be a criminal

case or a case where the faa needs to be involved at all. >> a lot of these people don't know what these are yet and they don't know what kind of cameras they carry. so they assume that if they can see one it can see you. that's really not the case. you might be 10 pixels in a resulting picture and two weeks ago, a guy was attacked by a woman on a public beach because he was flying one. he caught it luckily all on video. and the complaint was that it was vertical video. which shouldn't be allowed. and he was attacked because she said he was a pervert and he was doing, you know, and he posted the footage he got, which is very high level. it's like if you're looking at the grand canyon, that's the kind of shot you get. she didn't understand. what the thing was and what he was doing with it and hose to attack him for it instead. >> also one of the things people don't think about until they see them is you can put your camera phone and hold it over the fence and take a picture of your neighbor and they have no idea. you fly one of these buzzing things over their head, they totally know.

>> so next question. >> so are you getting any pushback from industries you could potentially be disrupting? for example if i made my business out of operating a crane camera, or doing helicopter shots for movies, you have this, would i be looking at this as rather threatening? >> i think for many of the industries, they are looking at this technology as a tool. and something very complementary to the existing way that they're doing it. and also, as something that's going to increase the total market size. so companies who are doing existing power line inspections by a manned helicopter are actually very excited about adopting this technology so they can actually do some of the miles of inspection of power line that maybe are not economical to do today via manned helicopter with drones. >> in terms of sort of cinematography. >> it's an increasing possibility. the whole space gets a lot bigger. you have these existing players doing perhaps something the old way.

there might be a good reason for putting a big helicopter in the air. there are many good reasons. i mean the specific case of hollywood, they've already been using these. when you see aerial shots, in movies, chances are they are not taken by helicopter. they're probably taken with a drone or opty copter or something and they've just been under the radar because it's not allowed to do this commercially by, you know, according to the faa. but now that's starting to change. we're seeing conversations between hollywood and the faa and some exceptions to the rules. >> unlike most robotics which we think of as replacing jobs, these create jobs. right now it's hard to get cameras in the sky because it's dangerous and expensive, and you need trained pilots and certification,ate kate ra. so the skies are largely empty. it's not like these things are replacing pilots. these are doing jobs that are not being done at all. >> another thing, my own experience, we were working with the university of uc-davis and we went to one of their farms. we were introduced to the farmer and he did not like us at all.

he looked at us like, ugh. and the professor introduced us, look, we want to try this new technology. this is going to be help us sort of automate the process of agriculture. he was completely opposed to using this. he's like, i walk my farms. i don't use these tools. and the funny thing that we sort of just understood the whole process. we went ahead and flew the drone around, got a lot of imagery. we were using these spv so you could see what the drone is seeing and we invited him to actually fly with us. he refused to do it. we had one last battery. do you want to try them on? he was just fascinated with these goggles. he finally agreed. he said, all right, i'll put them on. he put them on and he's like, can you fly to the left a little bit? can you fly to the right? can you go forward a little bit? so that was beautiful. it's like you're never going to

get -- you always need someone to analyze the data. that's what he was doing. he no longer has to walk, but he can still analyze the data using these tools. >> next question. >> hello here. i have heard about facebook and ngo internet orb, something like that. and they want to provide internet signal to everywhere, right, to remote places. what's the biggest challenge you see here for facebook to provide internet with drones internet signal. >> one of the big challenges is flying at such a high altitude. the way they are proposing doing this is using solar powered aircraft flying at about 70,000 feet. the benefit of flying at 70,000 feet is the controlled air space ends at 60,000 feet. so that's helpful. the challenging part is to actually get up to 70,000 feet and operate there, where there's very little air, and where you need an incredibly light

aircraft, which is in most cases, not incredibly sturdy. but you have to fly through all the other layers of air space to get up there. that's a really difficult challenge. another -- that's the altitude that's, you know, nearing space, so you actually have to harden your electronics and your software to deal with things like radiation. >> chris it was interesting over dinner you were talking about the peace dividend extending the fundamental technology that goes into this is similar to the technology that's going to high altitude drones, satellites. >> one of the things we think a lot about is are we competing with satellites? you know the cube sats and the microsats, between the elon musks and the planet labs, and the map box et cetera by google. we saw this picture before. 15 years ago, it was satellite phones versus cell phones. the satellite phones, it was like you put 64 satellites out

there and you cover the world. why would you put cell phone towers every three miles? that's crazy. it's so expensive. we saw how that ended up. it turned out the higher band wid width, sort of the resolution of the terrestrial network beat the reach of the satellite network. right now, these things have 100 times better resolution than satellites and they're under the clouds, and they're free. the data is free. the dispatch you can get any time access to the skies. satellites are getting better. the optics are getting better. the getting cheaper. and so i think this is going to be one of those epic battles. >> you get the system with these now with technologies. >> that's correct. one thing i want to answer his question about facebook. getting social networks interested in flying things is phenomenal. it helps all of us. free robotics helps all of us.

it helped me. it helps everybody. i think a lot of the stories out there specifically on that technology, i don't think none of it has been tested necessarily. but at least we're thinking big. and i think that's huge. being able to get there. going back to what chris said, these guys basically taking satellite companies lunch, i think that's going to happen. it's becoming easier and easier flying under the clouds. it's just going to happen. >> whether analyzing a field or photography, what types of interactions do you guys see these drones with nature? for instance, a bird landing on the drone, or maybe colliding with it.

so tell us about your experiences with that that are probably interesting. >> i'm smiling because i wrote an article that talked about my 15 friends that lost phantoms the month after i flew over water and had this video go viral. so there are interactions with wildlife, certainly. and many of the protected areas have overflight restrictions so you're not supposed to fly over them at low altitude anyway. mostly for nesting birds and other wildlife that might be influenced by these. i've flown over a lot of wildlife. i find for the most part these things are completely ignored. they don't know what they are. if it's a big animal, they are small. these things are small. if you're flying over like a whale, which i have not done. i'll point out. a lot of people will be listening to this. there are a lot of rules against these things in areas, and so, bird strikes are a factor. this goes back to safety. if you can design these things

so they are resistant to be struck by something, accidents can happen. >> regarding birds in particular the copter is not a problem but the fixed wing, airplanes are perceived as intrusions into territorial space by the birds of prey. so hawks often attack planes. and i can tell you the hawks win. >> i've had bees, dragonflies, sort of anything that flies will go investigate these things. and they usually just fly -- birds usually fly away from these things. i know some elephants have been known to be afraid of them because they sound like bees. elephants don't like bees. you have to look at each animal and see how it might respond. but mostly it's looking at where you're flying to determine whether you should be flying there. that's the most important thing. >> one interesting thing related to birds, we had a big company come to us asking when we were saying we were about data and

multiple companies came to us, asking for different use cases that are incredible. which makes me believe this is going to be massive space. this company basically wanted to hire us to dissuade birds away from these, what do you call it -- >> turbines? >> turbines. and we were -- you know, the contract and the deal was attractive enough for us to say, you know, let's try it out. we did a test. it's extremely challenging. right. you're trying to keep birds away from 2450es turbines. and birds get used to you. you know. they get scared first, but they get used to you. they go right past it. it's sort of, as we put more of these things in the air, i think birds are just going to get used to these things flying around. >> i'll give you one last story. so, the california condor is an endangered species. they have been attracted north by ranches, by cows.

carcasses, et cetera. but their natural territory is down in baja. so people were in charge of the san diego zoo and others in charge of helping with the condor conservation want to encourage the condors to move down south. so what they do is drop these cow carcasses, this sort of bread crumb trail down south. how do you tell a condor that there's a dead cow ten miles away? these birds look for these circling columns of other birds. how do you ensure -- you don't have a lot of time. you drop a dead cow, you want to get a circle of birds going. how do you catalyze a circle of birds and the answer is a drone. you get a drone to circle over a dead cow. from a distance it looks like another bird of prey. the condors are like, whoa, food, boom. and they just keep doing it, you know, every ten miles all the way down to baja. >> wow, that was a good question, thank you. next question please.

>> hi, over here. way over here. we have been talking a lot about drones as flying objects in terms of pound to pound, but as you said, chris, they could become like dust. so i'm wondering about how you are interacting with your clients and thinking about perhaps the drone is in our center piece tonight and able to view and listen to our conversation. while privacy you mentioned was kind of an aside, i don't think in those contexts that's really the case. how are you thinking about the evolution of drones in terms of embedded sensors into everyday experience because humans do not have the capacity perhaps to sense that there's a sensor. >> do you have a smartphone?

because i've been recording you this whole time. no, i -- yes, i mean the sensors are already here. you know, it may be more obvious right now because you have to take this thing out and do it. but there's a -- we're going to have to catch up to this -- you know, this space will catch up to the phone at some point. maybe. but these are getting more and more interesting. more and more sensors being packed in all the time. i think this is -- we've only gone in one direction historically. i don't know if that can sustain itself forever. >> answering your question about drones everywhere. people are building drones for water monitoring to actually, these boats that fly around -- that actually navigate on the water completely autonomous. so i think that you're going to see a lot of innovation beyond just flying things. the flying things get center stage and the most attention. there's innovation in robotics everywhere. mining. big trucks are now completely fully autonomous in australia.

you know, industries as a whole, they're looking for, you know, automation. remove when it comes to safety, remove the human from very dangerous places. and put robots instead. so that's going beyond just flying things. >> there's got to be a privacy discussion. fundamentally if you're talking about miniaturizing things that can record, can move in space and record, we have to think about privacy as a fundamental issue. no matter what tool you use to violate someone's privacy, you've still violated their privacy. so i would love to get a discussion away from drones, and theet these things as just tools, sensors, moving sensors, and make policy around the entire class. >> great, next question. >> this question is in response to jonathan's statement about hardware becoming free. i think in the course of

technology in the recent years is software has become free. probably about every new service i enroll in today is with free software. you see maybe not so concerned about the trend and i was curious how that mentality works and the business model works around that. >> certainly a lot of web-based software begins as free. it's definitely the case that a lot of people, especially large enterprises end up paying for a lot of that software. i know i personally pay for software as well as our company pays for a lot of software. >> isn't it also that -- this is just difficult. some of the scenarios you're talking about, where you're using multiple drones here, you're driving significant value, and maybe not cleaning windows, but, you know, there's significant value at stake here. >> i think the drone industry in its state today as having a lot of corollaries to the early kind of computer industry. it's certainly the case that people started by building a lot

of hardware building it in their garage, they're building likes like the altear 8080 where what you really bought was this big brick of hardware, which there was very little software available for it. then there was the emergence of the personal computer where a lot of the initially you're buying hardware, then there's the emergence of things like operating systems, which i think we all saw both dos and windows become the platform of choice for a number of decades. an then, you know, software moved in to the web. and i think we began to see eventually a model that was a lot more around maybe software that's free. but data that's paid for. and so i wouldn't be surprised at all if we see kind of a similar progression in what -- in where a lot of the value is in this space, as well. >> i agree. so our model is we give away the bits and sell the atoms. we give away all of our software, all of the source.

we happen to make money by substantiating the hardware and software. we sell some of that, other people sell some of that as well and we get our share. i agree with john. ultimately the data is going to be where the value lies and the services around that data. >> you mentioned a lot of the services you signed up for is free. they're not free. the product is you and you're paying in a different currency. so the data is what is important and that's why it's free. the other thing about hardware becoming free is that there are consumables in all of this stuff and it's the battery. so i think ought the other stuff may get free but batteries you have to replace and they're that going to be free. >> next question. >> hi, so eric you mentioned a few times that the drone is just a tool. so we've heard how it's a tool to collect data and stuff but i'm curious about specifically in the world of art, and cinematography, like whether it be a scorsese film, espn, the next blue planet, what is it that the actual cinematographer will be able to do that they've

never been able to do in the past, ignoring legality and privacy? >> yeah, there are -- the great thing about creative arenas is that it's really up to the people who are out there with the tools doing these things. and it's whatever they can dream of, they can do. we really think about these as cameras you can arbitrarily position. so it's mostly the low altitude stuff. anything that's close to the ground that's beyond reach is new territory. and what we're seeing now is a mad rush for people to collect as much of that footage as possible because it's all new. the first video i had go viral was just a video of surfers. that was it. i went out for a morning for fun and shot it. and no one had seen that, no one had filmed surfers from 15 feet up before, and tracked them as they were going down the waves. and it's not a particularly great video by today's standards because it was done a year ago but it captured the imagination

of a lot of these people. so it's really cameras that can stay in one place, hover precisely at low altitude that create opportunities. there's significant challenges. they make noise. they are big, they have the possibility of crashing and you don't want the damage of fragile environment or people. so there certainly are challenges. but if you go -- i mean, if you just do a youtube search on drone videos you'll find virtual every kind of low altitude imagery imaginable. some of it is incredibly creative. a lot of it is actually people having fun in the backyard. it's the whole spectrum. >> it's interesting. if you look at the rise of gopro being used professionally, one of the things that's amazing about gopro, for camera people, it's kind of disposable. it can get damaged. when will drones be considered disposable in that kind of

context? >> we're sort of already there. they're similarly price. this costs less than the high end gopro. well, you have to add a gopro so it. but they don't cost very much. i think of them as being tools that are essentially disposable. if you're working -- if you're working in imagery, you've already spent a lot of your money and time on gear, on travel, all these things. and these are relatively inexpensive when skared to all those other costs. the thing that i'm worried about when you talk about them being disposal is littering. you don't want to really consider them to be disposable. if you go to some national parks now like see a beautiful arch you'll find phantom propeller parts all over it because everyone's tried to fly through it. you really want to think about these things as being -- and the batteries, and everything, can catch fire. there's potential for bad things to happen. one of the things we've been working on with the scientific thing is disposable drones where the airplanes, where the foam is made out of biodegradable

corn-based foam. and they -- you send 100 out and none come back. but the data comes back. and they -- you know, things in the arctic measuring the temperature of pools. and what happens is they -- when they don't have to come back it doubles the range. and they land in the water, the foam melts. very small number of metal bits, you know, sink to the bottom. the batteries are a slight issue. we have to resolve that. but the foam, we've solved the foam. just one last thought on the creative elements. we have set our expect -- this is the golden age of videography. we have in our pockets the most extraordinary cameras and software, and then standard based on youtube and gopro that we now have the ability to sell our own stories to record our own lives in cinematic quality, and this is just one more of those tools. if you watch espn, or you know an nfl game you get the -- there's these cameras on,s on, on, you know, wires and you get the incredible aerial shots.

why shouldn't your kid's soccer game be recorded with the same fidelity? now you can. >> we have time for one more question. >> here. regarding the application of drone for delivering goods in rural or urban area, and especially looking ahead when we're going to have like hundreds of drone flying, how do you consider it a problem of the air traffic, also the air traffic control? who is going to monitoring and manage? who's going to be private or the public agency? so i can see that. >> we're working with nasa to explore some options of building out what is considered an air traffic manage -- a low altitude air traffic management system specifically for very small uavs for this kind of futuristic application of something like aerial delivery. i think some of the key elements of that, of course, is like connectivity, internet connectivity with the drones themselves so that they can all be essentially relaying in

realtime where they're positioned and coordinate in a way like the robots in kiva systems implementation are all communicating their locations with each other in realtime so that what looks like a near-miss between two robots is actually a well orchestrated system by which the two robots could have never hit each other even if one of them had lost communications. and i think we'll see something similar built out for small uavs eventually. >> we're doing the same thing. there's a standard called adsb which is basically a transponder, where aircraft carry this thing in a peer-to-peer air traffic control detection. but it doesn't have to be a physical device. it can actually since we already have a telemetry link it can be a virtual signal by which the aircraft knows its position, sends its position via telemetry and it's broadcast by virtual usb network that the faa may run. we are actually already implemented virtual ausb and our

vehicles can report their position. >> just like we have cars that have registration and they're tracked by cameras in every corner and police and everything, i think, i believe, you know, early days, i was working on this thing called air highway. and we basically took the initiative to talk to the city first and figure out how they can benefit from these things flying around. we created a structure to focus on how the city benefits and from registration, from toll payments, basically tracking every single move so that the cities also benefit from these things flying around. then we basically layer on top of that a sort of what the technology would be to put -- to lay out this sort of -- it was a very ambitious project. sort of like 15 years from now. that's why i never did it. >> that's great. >> thanks, back to karen. >> just want to say thank you to our speakers so much for being

so sharing with your perspectives. really appreciate it. [ applause ] and also to robin for your guidance, pre, and during program, guiding this conversation. you did a wonderful job. [ applause ] we have a small gift for you. it is the speaker t-shirt of the churchill club. please wear that in good health. the video of the program should be available by tomorrow or next day on our youtube channel. which is youtube.com/churchillclub and you've been a very wonderful audience as usual. thank you so much. hope to see you next week. good night.

on c-span3 tonight, a special presentation of the 2014 new york ideas festival. speakers this year include founders of kick-starter, chobani yogurt, donors choose.org and former congresswoman gabby gifrds. you'll also hear about curing cancer, the future of finance starting at 8:00 eastern here on c-span3. also tonight the first statewide broadcast of a debate between minnesota governor mark dayton, republican candidate jeff johnson, and independent party candidate hannah nicolet. we'll have that live at 8:00 eastern on c-span. also c-span radio and it will be streamed online at c-span.org. and a look at some of the political ads running in that state.

>> a few years ago, things in minnesota weren't going very well. so we got a new coach. he made the tough decisions. and now, things are looking up. we've added over 150,000 new jobs, and have one of the fastest growing economies in the nation. cut taxes while increasing our rainy day fund, and investing in education. darn good record, right? darn good coach. >> hi, i'm jeff johnson, as governor i'll audit every state program. and i'm pretty thorough. >> all done? >> yep. >> i don't think so. >> done with your homework? >> yep. >> let's just double-check that. >> did you eat this? mark dayton should be held accountable for wasting our money. his luxury office for politicians and bonuses for failed obamacare bure contracts prove that he's out of touch with middle class minnesotans. it's time for a governor who gets it, and gets us. >> jeff johnson for governor.

>> in a state plagued by partisan dysfunction and special interests, a team of extraordinary candidates has stepped forward to restore minnesota's government back to its people. meet hannah nicollet, brandon borgos, bob helland, and pat dean as state auditor. together they are the independents. coming november 4th to a state capitol near you. prepared and paid for by the independence party candidates committees. >> and you can watch the minnesota governor's debate tonight, starting at 8:00 eastern on our companion network c-span. u.p.s. recently announced that it will expand its 3-d printing services, equipping nearly 100 additional stores with the technology for a total of nearly 150 stores. the house small business committee held a hearing earlier this year on commercial uses for 3-d printing. committee members and witnesses examined potential tradeoffs of

the technology, including the possibility of making certain products obsolete. this is about 90 minutes. >> -- we also have a vote coming up at any moment which will delay the hearing slightly. which i apologize for that. we never know for sure when they're going to schedule votes and unfortunately they're going to schedule it right in the middle of our hearing. but we'll go ahead and get started and see how far we can get before they do call that vote. 3-d printing, or added manufacturing is a process of creating objects from a digital model. typically through the deposit of material layered upon layer until an object is formed. and today we're here to discuss just how 3-d printing is spreading innovation and entrepreneurship all across the country. the technology's been around since the 1980s, it has traditionally been used by large companies in industrial settings for rapid prototyping. but in the last ten years 3-d printers have become more affordable which is opening the door for smaller businesses and entrepreneurs to begin

benefiting from this -- from the technology. for instance, some models are now available for under $1500 and analysts expect prices to continue to go down. small businesses and entrepreneurs are using 3-d printing in a variety of ways. has the ability to save time and costs during the creation of prototypes. make highly accurate parts that assist in product production, produce finished products that may be sold directly to end users. 3-d printing has become and will increasingly be a critical component of the operations of many small businesses. while a number of entrepreneurs and at-home innovators are using it to print models of products that they intend to manufacture by traditional methods others are using the technology to create products from start to finish. sometimes, you know, that can be done right there in the garage. as 3-d printers continue to be become more affordable and advanced the number of small businesses that begin as household manufacturers is likely to skyrocket.

while some embrace and capitalize on new technologies, others are very wary and cautious about the technology. as congress and other regulatory bodies consider policies applicable to this and other technological this and other technological advances, it's important we must not be hasty and do not unduly restrict the ability of small businesses, entrepreneurs and other innovators to grow our economy. we're fortunate to have with us a very interesting group of makers and using of the technology, which includes entrepreneurs. i look forward to how small businesses are using the technology to grow and create jobs. which is what this committee is all about. so we'll move right onto our witness. patrick is the founder and ceo of a clip-on lens for iphones

and other apple products. he was product manager and vp at premier systems which an information consulting organization. mr. o'neil was named entrepreneur magazine's 2013 entrepreneur of the year. welcome to the committee. we look forward to hearing your testimony. >> chairman graves, ranking member velasquez and members, i inventeded this clip-on lens for the iphone. i'm very grateful for the opportunity to speak with you regarding our use of 3-2 printing and how it's helped from a small business going from a kitchen start-up to selling a product in every apple store worldwide. this pace is required for us to be at the forefront of mobile technology and keep jobs in

america. the design was inspired by the philosophies of steve jobs for clean, simple designs. since the start we employed the simple design philosophy. at the beginning when the design studio was in my kitchen, we used a 3-d printing company. i would ask myself, would steve jobs think this product was good enough? the answer would unvariably be no. and we would keep refining until we felt the result would meet standards. after a year of development, we launched the product through the platform in may of 2011. they received funding within four weeks and achieved almost five times our funding goal. since our start three years ago, we moved three times the larger offices and now employ more than

50 people in huntington beach, california. including seven full-time designers. today we considered the leader in products. they are sold in more than 90 countries. they have attracted a legion of users and received numerous awards. i was also, as you mentioned, entrepreneur of the year. by entrepreneur magazine. 3-2 printing enabled me to move quickly and turned my product quickly. design in 3-d printing are still the core of our development. in just six months we enhanced tools thanks to 3-d printing. we have invested more than $50,000 in 3-d printing. to protect our own products. we also print models of rumored devices so lenses can be designed quickly each time apple releases a new version. we sketch an idea in the morning, model it in the afternoon, send it to the 3-d printer and have a prototype that evening. fast turn around is key for companies in this space. we finished and validated an

iphone 5 version within days of the announcement. i can't imagine doing this without our own 3-d printer. this is the process of developing our own products. we first start with brainstorming and concept generation, then sketch ideas and create models of those ideas on a computer. then print the models on the 3-d printer. next evaluate prototype for functionality, proportion and aesthetics. changes are made if needed and reprinted. if the prototype is approved and everything looks good, we move forward to mass production. mobile device market changes so quickly, to stay competitive we use the 3-d printer every day for new ideas. we found it's the best way to move quickly and get a product faster. we can now develop products in a week or two without 3-d printing and as apple launches products there are market opportunities. this could result in a potential loss of millions of dollars of sales and perhaps even failure. small and mid sized companies like ours need the ability to compete on the world stage.

especially in rapidly changing industries like consumer technology. as 3-d printing evolves, e would like to use it for bridge manufacturing and use marketing to manufacturer faster. we continue to think differently and are not afraid to try new things. we only build products if we can innovate. 3-d printing allows us to take more risks because it shrinks the opportunity cost. we are able to test designs in a day or two rather than a month or two. if they are unsuccessful we can quickly move on to try something else. our successes come from our passion and perseverance. our ability to take new risks and blaze trails comes to product innovation. as congress considers policies, it is important tone sure entrepreneurs are using technology in innovative ways. i'm honored to be here today. many thanks to the chairman, ranking member, and this committee. >> thanks, mr. o'neil. our next witness is executive vice president of public affairs for stratesis, a global leading

manufacturer of 3-d printers. mr. cobb served in government relations and global marketing and serves as the company's spokesperson. he's also held the position of vice president general manager for the dimensional 3 h df printing business of stratasys. welcome to the committee. >> thank you. chairman, ranking member, and committee members, thank you for the opportunity to tell you about 3-d printing and how our company stratesis is helping small businesses grow and thrive in this economy. my name is jonathan cobb, and i'm executive president of stratasys. stratasys says a member of the national association of manufacturers and i'm honored to testify on behalf of the organization. as the nation's largest manufacturing and trade association the name represent 12,000 small and large

manufacturers in every industrial sector in every state. manufacturers are the worlds leading innovators and perform two-thirds of all private sector r -- in the nation, producing more innovative breakthroughs than any others. i'm proud to say that 3-d printing and stratasys are part of this innovative american industry. you may be asking, what is 3-d printing and why should i care about it? simply put, 3-d printing is a process of turning blueprints into tangible objects within a matter of hours. you send digital images to a computer, when then shakes plastics and other materials into objects. i brought some later for questions. although the concept may be new to many of you today, this technology has existed for decades.

it was originally created to help engineers test designs before spending money on expensive factory tooling for reproduction. today 3-d printers are not just used to make prototypes, they're also used for low volume manufacturing, and items such as prosthetic limbs and interior components of aircraft. 3-d printing is also in the classroom. nearly one-quarter of our business has been in education. by learning design and manufacturing through 3d technology, we're helping build a strong hiring pool for businesses in america. this brings up an important point. 3-d printing will serve as another tool in a toolbox for manufacturers to deliver products to markets in efficient and customized ways. stratasys was started in 1988 and has been growing ever since. in 2005 we started a separate

business unit called red eye which is a service that can produce 3-d printed parts for those who don't own a 3-d printer. we also acquired solid scape of merrimack, new hampshire, which helps jewelry designers and dental markets adopt 3-d solutions. last year we merged with brooklyn based maker bot, a 3-d printing company whose user friendly products are designed for prosumers and entrepreneurs with basic technical skills. the growth of our business has helped others as well. when magician chris miles was performing at events with his band, he used a popular credit card reader to process payments when he sold his cds. the credit card reader plugged into his laptop but he found that the reader tended to swivel or spin when it was used instead of remaining stable. that made it sometimes difficult to use. borrowing from his children's

lego pieces, chris built an accessory that kept the card stable. with the successful design, chris wanted to bring his new innovation to market. it would have been costly and inefficient using traditional production methods, so instead he invested in a consumer level 3-d printer which is literally become a factory in his desk enabled him to produce his invention from home for a couple thousand dollars and sell thousands of them. we take pride in stories like this. to us they demonstrate we are not just a business of producing 3-d printing machines. we are also helping empower entrepreneurs by bringing manufacturing into their homes and workspaces. our presence here today show that is the interest in 3-d printing is strong and the future is infinite. our industry is experiencing rapid growth. it is giving domestic