The Era of Internet Drones: An Interview with Dronesmith Co-founder Jinger Zeng
This interview is with Jinger Zeng of Dronesmith Technologies which enables drone developers and innovators by providing them with the tools to facilitate the application development process. Dronesmith recently graduated from the Techstars IoT incubator and presented at Demo Day in New York City.
The Drone Series explores the drone industry via discussions with CEOs of leading companies, giving investors and industry analysts the opportunity to hear directly from emerging technology leaders. The series is lead by CEO Grant Canary of DroneSeed which is a drone company positioning to automate and dominate the forestry services vertical.
GRANT: What is DroneSmith insanely good at?
JINGER: We make middleware and developer tools that automates drone data into the cloud. We’re passionate about making the best tools for drone developers. We come from background of drone development and wireless data acquisition, we know how hard it is to develop end-to-end drone solutions. Using drones as tools, it’s still a very complex system to engineer: you have to make the drone fly, integrate with different sensors, send the data through some sort of communications network, then build an application that can make sense of the data and make use of the data, then create actionable insights. The value is in the last step; however people could spend up to 2 years in the development process. So we thought, what if we can standardize it, accelerate it and build the pipeline for drone data so other developers don’t have to worry about managing those “back-ends”, and get to market 30x faster.
GRANT: Can you share a customer success story with us?
JINGER: A customer wanted a drone demo with thermal camera and broadcasting capability for an event in three weeks. The customer was turned down everywhere because that development normally would require six months of development time. We got it done in three days, from thermal camera integration to broadcast the live stream over internet. One of the coolest part of the story, is that the developer who was collaborating with us building another piece of software was in Argentina, and he was able to deploy software over the cloud tools we built to the drone sitting in Las Vegas.
GRANT: What use cases enabled by drones accessing cloud data are you most excited about?
JINGER: The two uses cases that I’m really excited about are search and rescue and drone racing.
Instead of sending search and rescue teams on the ground, drones cover a wide range of area detecting a warm body through a thermal camera. When it finds one, it initiates operations or protocol for the best way to get the rescue team to that location. One of the integration we are working on is fog computing to switch the mode of drones. Think of the scenario of search and rescue, the onboard software would start using the thermal camera, but then after finding a person, switch itself to a high-resolution camera transmitting video data while drone is hovering.
Another exciting use case is drone racing, which is currently at just enthusiasts level. Pilots wear goggles to see the drone’s point of view, but spectators only see the drones flying around. We want to change that so that spectators can see the first-person views of all the pilots at once on any device. We also want to use the on-board intelligence to collect real-time sports analytics and performance data, similar to how fans obsess over baseball stats and those stats enable sports betting.
GRANT: Let me switch a bit and ask about you. How did you get into DroneSmith?
JINGER: My technical background is actually in solar and in IoT. In college, I was the engineering lead for the Solar Decathlon, a Department of Energy competition. I built a smart home, net-zero, that was solar-powered with home automation features using IoT technics. Our team won first place in the nation and second place in the world. At the time my cofounder, Greg, was the lead roboticist in our UAV lab at our school. We got together, joint forces, and started the company in our last semester of college. For us, we see drones are like the computers in the 80s, and we are really excited to be in this emerging new industry and shaping the landscape.
GRANT: Continuing the comparison to computers in the 80s, where do you think drone technology is at?
JINGER: Probably around the time when Cisco was founded. So around the time when networking companies are rising after many hardware, software existed. In other words, I think we’re shifting into the era of Internet of Drones.
GRANT: Changing topics, how is it awesome to be a female CEO? I personally would love to see more female CEOs. Do you have any thoughts for aspiring women?
JINGER: That’s one of my favorite questions actually. I actually feel very fortunate to be in this position, so be able to set an example and hopefully create real impact for women in tech. Women found some of the most powerful tech companies. I aspire Sandy Learner of Cisco and Diane Green of VMWare a lot. For me, it took quite some personal growth to gain the confidence to take on the CEO role. When Greg and I started the company, he was CEO and I was COO. Ultimately we figured out he was great at product, and I was the one doing customer development, so it made sense for us to re-position ourselves, and we as founders mutually consent on it without any argument. We work great together and we have a phenomenal team.
My female perspectives do make a difference and infiltrate in our branding and business development.
GRANT: How do you interact with other female business leaders, either as advisees or mentors?
JINGER: I surround myself with successful and experienced executives, both male and female; I’ve built out a wonderful support structure around me. That includes our company advisory board as well as my personal board of mentors.
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Have a question you want to ask, send it to founders@droneseed.co.
See other interviews in the series here:
From Kosovo to Sand Hill Road: A discussion with Skyward CEO Jonathan Evans
The Democratization of Flight by Drones
Drones and Simplifying the Future
Why Drones are Taking Off in Unexpected Industries
How to Build Trust in Drones
The Evolution of Drones as a Service (DaaS)
Mentoring startups, fostering talent and using technology for good
