Real estate companies often have a need for aerial photography. Perhaps you want to showcase an existing building. Perhaps you want to capture the views from a future/proposed building. Or perhaps you’d like to document a building under construction.
Usually in the latter case, you have to find a neighboring building and negotiate some sort of agreement so that you can place a camera on it and document your construction site. This is probably still the solution if you want a clean time lapse video.
But drones have opened up a new world of possibility and today I thought I would share with you a company called DroneBase. They’ll probably hate that I’m making this reference, but one way to describe them is Uber for drones. They connect a “large network of drone pilots” to customers needing drone footage for commercial or creative purposes.
If you take a look at their website, you’ll see that they cater a lot to the real estate and construction industries. I’m not sure how active they are in Toronto and Canada right now, but if they aren’t that active I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before they are.
And over time, I am sure that a network like this will only mean faster, better, and more affordable aerial footage.
Yesterday it was announced (here, here, and here) that Toronto-based Top Hat has raised $22.5 million (USD) in Series-C funding. The round was led by New York-based Union Square Ventures.
I am always excited to see Toronto-based startups doing well and I am particularly excited by this remark in USV’s blog announcement:
“Also worth noting is that Toronto continues to impress us with its quality and diversity of companies. We now have five investments there, placing Toronto third as a location in the USV portfolio after New York and San Francisco.”
Here is another quote from Fred Wilson’s blog:
“Toronto is a great place for startups. In addition to five investments of ours that are HQ’d there, I know of at least one other USV portfolio company that has much of their engineering team in Toronto. The talent, mindset, and quality of the people in the Toronto/Waterloo tech/startup community is really top notch and we love investing there.”
Go Toronto.
(Of course, Toronto really means Toronto-Waterloo. That’s the geography of the ecosystem.)
Real estate companies often have a need for aerial photography. Perhaps you want to showcase an existing building. Perhaps you want to capture the views from a future/proposed building. Or perhaps you’d like to document a building under construction.
Usually in the latter case, you have to find a neighboring building and negotiate some sort of agreement so that you can place a camera on it and document your construction site. This is probably still the solution if you want a clean time lapse video.
But drones have opened up a new world of possibility and today I thought I would share with you a company called DroneBase. They’ll probably hate that I’m making this reference, but one way to describe them is Uber for drones. They connect a “large network of drone pilots” to customers needing drone footage for commercial or creative purposes.
If you take a look at their website, you’ll see that they cater a lot to the real estate and construction industries. I’m not sure how active they are in Toronto and Canada right now, but if they aren’t that active I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before they are.
And over time, I am sure that a network like this will only mean faster, better, and more affordable aerial footage.
Yesterday it was announced (here, here, and here) that Toronto-based Top Hat has raised $22.5 million (USD) in Series-C funding. The round was led by New York-based Union Square Ventures.
I am always excited to see Toronto-based startups doing well and I am particularly excited by this remark in USV’s blog announcement:
“Also worth noting is that Toronto continues to impress us with its quality and diversity of companies. We now have five investments there, placing Toronto third as a location in the USV portfolio after New York and San Francisco.”
Here is another quote from Fred Wilson’s blog:
“Toronto is a great place for startups. In addition to five investments of ours that are HQ’d there, I know of at least one other USV portfolio company that has much of their engineering team in Toronto. The talent, mindset, and quality of the people in the Toronto/Waterloo tech/startup community is really top notch and we love investing there.”
Go Toronto.
(Of course, Toronto really means Toronto-Waterloo. That’s the geography of the ecosystem.)
“When you think about it, all business activity really comes down to two simple things: Making decisions and executing on decisions. Your success depends on your ability to develop speed as a habit in both.”
What makes this topic so interesting is that, for a number of reasons, speed has a tendency to get sacrificed. It might be because the plan isn’t yet perfect or because there’s a belief that Y can’t happen until X is complete.
Perhaps it’s because the value of speed is harder to measure than the value of “perfection.”
I particularly like the notion that you know you’re going fast enough when there’s a bit of discomfort and you’re feeling stretched, but not overstretched in an unsustainable way. Here’s another excerpt from Dave’s article:
“While I was at Google, Larry Page was extremely good at forcing decisions so fast that people were worried the team was about to drive the car off a cliff. He’d push it as far as he could go without people crossing that line of discomfort. It was just his fundamental nature to ask, “Why not? Why can’t we do it faster than this?” and then wait to see if people started screaming. He really rallied everyone around this theory that fast decisions, unless they’re fatal, are always better.”
A big part of this, I find, is momentum. An object at rest stays at rest. But an object in motion stays in motion. Remember this law? In this context, it is decisions that power motion and help to build and sustain momentum.
Of course, the ideal outcome is both lightning fast and high quality decisions.
The title of this post is homage to Facebook’s original corporate motto: “Move fast and break things.” This slogan was later adjusted to “Move fast with stable infrastructure”, which I think demonstrates our constant struggle between speed and quality.
“When you think about it, all business activity really comes down to two simple things: Making decisions and executing on decisions. Your success depends on your ability to develop speed as a habit in both.”
What makes this topic so interesting is that, for a number of reasons, speed has a tendency to get sacrificed. It might be because the plan isn’t yet perfect or because there’s a belief that Y can’t happen until X is complete.
Perhaps it’s because the value of speed is harder to measure than the value of “perfection.”
I particularly like the notion that you know you’re going fast enough when there’s a bit of discomfort and you’re feeling stretched, but not overstretched in an unsustainable way. Here’s another excerpt from Dave’s article:
“While I was at Google, Larry Page was extremely good at forcing decisions so fast that people were worried the team was about to drive the car off a cliff. He’d push it as far as he could go without people crossing that line of discomfort. It was just his fundamental nature to ask, “Why not? Why can’t we do it faster than this?” and then wait to see if people started screaming. He really rallied everyone around this theory that fast decisions, unless they’re fatal, are always better.”
A big part of this, I find, is momentum. An object at rest stays at rest. But an object in motion stays in motion. Remember this law? In this context, it is decisions that power motion and help to build and sustain momentum.
Of course, the ideal outcome is both lightning fast and high quality decisions.
The title of this post is homage to Facebook’s original corporate motto: “Move fast and break things.” This slogan was later adjusted to “Move fast with stable infrastructure”, which I think demonstrates our constant struggle between speed and quality.
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Brandon Donnelly
Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly.
Brandon Donnelly
Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly.
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