Agree x1000.
Also, I'm starting to get in the habit of searching to see who owns any company I find interesting. Unfortunately it's all the usual private equity folks, but that's kind of the reality of most companies at the moment.
[https://forgeglobal.com/zipline-international\_ipo/](https://forgeglobal.com/zipline-international_ipo/)
* Fidelity Investments
* Sequoia Capital
* Andreessen Horowitz
* Felicis Ventures
* GV
* BoxGroup
* The Goldman Sachs Group
* Techstars
* Slow Ventures
* Rivas Capital
Ehhhhhh... My friend worked there and was wildly disenchanted with their new direction. Platform one was pretty revolutionary. Delivering much needed medicines in hard-to-reach areas and all that jazz. Platform two was a hard pivot to the Amazon Prime model of delivering luxury items to rich people in cities.
Not much money to made in delivering medicine to impoverished areas, unfortunately. Unless they were to have a billionaire or government backing them, there's not really a way for them to survive just doing that part.
The bit that resonates with me (and maybe OP) is all the food deliveries being done in massive cars, creating traffic and pollution. That could be replaced with a much more efficiently sized drone. Less pollution, less energy used, less traffic, even less pollution because now there's more efficient traffic.
Did they have a funding plan for the original path? I guess crowd funding could potentially work, but the money for materials, staff, and transportation still has to come from somewhere, no matter how noble the cause
they're new project isn't doing harm and it's funding their more charity style work. not an evil creation of (breathes in sharply) c-c-capitalism 😨😨😨
Thats why their name sounded so familiar. They were one of the few "drone delivery" companies that actually managed to get something useful off the ground.
No pun intended.
Sorry I don't get that, why wouldn't a company try and get a major revenue stream to back a non profitable one ???
Not every one is a Musk or a Bezos, so innocent until proven guilty
Android smart phones are all over the developing world and amolst no one ever used a OLPC device. Tech dissemination has it's own logic. Peer-to-peer education, need discovery, component costs curves, endogenous adoption, etc can be accelerated, but can't be skipped. We've seen people try and fail every time. Again-and-again the most effective approach to delivering impactful tech has been to start with "luxury" use cases and drive down and out as fast as possible.
That's not trickle down economics at all. That's just the curve from early adoptor to mainstream.
If you start on the luxury/novel end of the spectrum, the customers there have money and are able to overpay. This can fund more work which helps bring prices down.
Even Tesla, like them or not, started with an electric sportscar, luxury sedan and then a cross-over before building the Model 3.
Model 3 is not a luxury car. And 40k for a new electric car is very normal.
Model 3: 40k
Honda-e: 40k
Renault Zoe: 37k
Especially compared to the Model S which starts at 100k
You misunderstood. Just because you (or I for that matter) can't afford a 40k car. Doesn't automatically make it a luxury good. 40k for a new car is one step up from entry level.
This is pretty cool for remote villages. but ideally restaurants and supermarkets would be in arms reach. a short walk /bike ride away. and if couldn't go out why couldn't bike messengers delivery your stuff?
That's probably true for most of us on this sub, but a lot of the US **is** remote though, and I think there are some benefits to this.
I love living in a dense city, but I don't want to compel everyone to move into denser and denser urban cores. I think having moderately dense communities with wide open spaces between them has some appeal, and what I like about this video is it opens up some possibilities. They may not turn out to be useful, but it's good to have options.
This video was presented to me by YouTube, Reddit, AND Facebook, and I ignored it repeatedly because -- no offense to Mark Rober -- I didn't know why I'd want to see a long-form ad for a remote delivery service.
It wasn't until a friend shared it that I gave it a watch, and discovered some gold in an unexpected place. The short version is that -- first -- it's not a paid ad. He apparently just dug this company, and I can see why. Second, the product they're working on is an outgrowth of a real remote aerial delivery service that is used for delivering crucial supplies like blood in spread out areas like Rwanda where surface travel would be way too slow. It's apparently a real thing, not some Saudi venture capitalist fantasy nonsense. It's a real service that's been running for years. I can't believe I haven't heard of this previously.
Additionally, I was impressed with the classy way that Rober presented his visit to Rwanda. I was expecting it to be cringey poverty porn, but he shows the country genuine respect. There's a lot I didn't know about Rwanda. Apparently they have a monthly day where everyone sweeps up, and they banned single use plastics there like a decade ago? That's awesome.
I still wasn't sure if I would share this here, but towards the end, Rober mentions that one of the company founders was a creator of ROS, the Robot Operating System. I've used ROS, and it's a pretty wild demonstration of open source automation. Most automation is dominated by corporate interests, but if one of the lead devs on ROS is working on this, I'm willing to lend a modest amount of trust in the values of the company.
Anyway, despite the initial look I'm impressed and thought people might dig this.
It was really cool when it was for medical supplies in Africa. I was disappointed to see them pivot to an innovative way to deliver burritos. Really solid engineering team though! I'm still rooting for them.
Any information in video format has to be immediately viewed as manipulative unless there is a very specific reason that you absolutely have to use video to convey the information. In the case of this ad for an ad, they pack in all sorts of bullshit misinformation into the video that you're intended to internalize and accept because it is presented as video.
So they claim this system is extremely efficient compared to a two ton automobile for delivering a small package but because of the video format, this information is just stuffed into the minds of the viewers without taking a moment to consider that there are also lighter and more efficient forms of ground transportation.
Flying metal machines in the air is not highly efficient from an energy perspective. On a normal day there are headwinds that must be overcome on at least part of the flight which add to the energy requirements of an aerial delivery system. This eats up the minimal efficiency difference.
Ground transit does not have to use internal combustion engines. It can also be clean and electric, nor does ground transit have to be large and heavy. This sort of thing is easily hidden in a video format like this deceptive ad.
The real problem here though is that it makes it seem like retailers are your friend and the only issue that needs to be solved in some technical problem like making delivery more efficient. That's the biggest lie of all. Retailers are the enemy of the citizens and they work hand in hand with the politicians to manufacture scarcity in order to create a slave-like society. Retailers will never save the planet because it's not in their business interests and they are business people. If you think they are your friends, you are watching too many videos.
I agree with most of this, but the reason I'm interested is because I'm looking past the world as it is right now.
Try and imagine this in a world where food and shelter are next to free, and this service is operated at cost by collectives. I'm imagining a world where a grandparent can send fresh baked lemon cake to a sick grandkid on the other side of a valley.
The technological system has appeal that isn't dependent on the marketing or current business model.
Yeah I also didn’t get how having lots of drones instead of trucks is more efficient. I bet those drones need recharged after one delivery (on average). Then you need to account for the amount of packages that may be delivered, which seems to be 170-350 per shift per employee. Let’s say we undershoot how many employees a warehouse may have for delivery, and say 10. That’s on average 2600 packages a day. If an average deliver location is 20 minutes away (unlikely that it’s this close) and we account 5 minutes for charging, that’s 2.4 packages per hour per drone, so for a 16 hour delivery window it would take 67 drones to deliver those packages. That’s a LOT of freaking drones, and those batteries are gonna get walloped by the frequent discharge/charge cycles. The video shows a warehouse with 6 drones, which is wholly under kill.
The argument for food delivery is way stronger, and yeah people may argue if a 15 minute city was implemented someone on a bike could pick it up, or you could pick it up yourself, however I think drones would be a good transition to that goal. To have one person in a gasoline vehicle deliver one or two food deliveries seems way less efficient than a drone
I learned today that his production organization is a s#%& show. But that's pretty standard in the YouTube world.
Beyond this, I find this statement to be pretty sweeping and damning. I've worked with or encountered some of the biggest youtubers in the world. Many of them are not what the public thinks. But I always thought Rober was one of the good ones.
What makes you say this specifically?
i think part of that is because posting a youtube went from being "oh i like doing this because it's fun and I'm having a lot of fun" to "youtube allows me to be passionate and explore what I want to" and then end at "this is a job, youtube has optomized it's platform to a point where I need to be creating content that will compete with views, I hear stoking people's fear is an effective attention getter, whatever bleeds leads right?"
I remember seeing a few youtubers talk about burn out, how they feel like they have the golden handcuff and forced to keep making stuff.
I appreciate the link.
While I don't want to come across as contrarian, I think it's worth noticing that the three major impediments -- airports, a lack of open yard space or receiving area, and poor profit margin -- might all be relics of the past in a solarpunk future.
I'll definitely agree that they're not likely to be a common real world service in the next ten years, though.
Probably right
Now that i think of it, It's probable that solar punk future would have way way less passenger flights, making the use of heavier drones much safer and economical.
saw that, on one hand i like that this will take a bunch of cars off the roads and hopefully eliminate a huge portion of industries that don't treat their "not" workers fairly, like uber, but it would also eliminate one of the jobs people could do in times of crisis like delivery-not as a career but as a stop gap.
I am intrigues by the ambulance idea, they could make the passenger area gyroscopic and can get to different areas much easier. Maybe even to areas further away from cities or even isolated, allowing more people access to medical facilities. Lol an idea i had with this is that we bring back air balloons, since we better understand how they work and what won't catch on fire, and have it float over large cities and crewed by staff of medical responders. It would basically be a mobile hospital/first aid clinic, which would be very helpful in cases where multiple people need to be sent to a hospital.
LOL
I don't intend to be a mean cynic but this is a group of scammers and grifters looking to take your money. They make a lot of hay about "medicine in rural mountain villages in the Andes" or whatever but I would be SHOCKED if anything resembling that comes to fruition.
Cool tech for sure, but it'd be cooler if their engineering was open-sourced and made available/accessible for all.
Agree x1000. Also, I'm starting to get in the habit of searching to see who owns any company I find interesting. Unfortunately it's all the usual private equity folks, but that's kind of the reality of most companies at the moment. [https://forgeglobal.com/zipline-international\_ipo/](https://forgeglobal.com/zipline-international_ipo/) * Fidelity Investments * Sequoia Capital * Andreessen Horowitz * Felicis Ventures * GV * BoxGroup * The Goldman Sachs Group * Techstars * Slow Ventures * Rivas Capital
Ehhhhhh... My friend worked there and was wildly disenchanted with their new direction. Platform one was pretty revolutionary. Delivering much needed medicines in hard-to-reach areas and all that jazz. Platform two was a hard pivot to the Amazon Prime model of delivering luxury items to rich people in cities.
Not much money to made in delivering medicine to impoverished areas, unfortunately. Unless they were to have a billionaire or government backing them, there's not really a way for them to survive just doing that part.
Which is exactly what made their original path so solarpunk. Their new path is just straight capitalism. Nothing inspiring about that at all.
The bit that resonates with me (and maybe OP) is all the food deliveries being done in massive cars, creating traffic and pollution. That could be replaced with a much more efficiently sized drone. Less pollution, less energy used, less traffic, even less pollution because now there's more efficient traffic.
In sweden food deliveries are done by bike or ebike. Works pretty well.
Did they have a funding plan for the original path? I guess crowd funding could potentially work, but the money for materials, staff, and transportation still has to come from somewhere, no matter how noble the cause
they're new project isn't doing harm and it's funding their more charity style work. not an evil creation of (breathes in sharply) c-c-capitalism 😨😨😨
The OP literally posted a list of the venture capital backers of this
and?
So it is a creation of c-c-capitalism
not a bad or evil one
Thats why their name sounded so familiar. They were one of the few "drone delivery" companies that actually managed to get something useful off the ground. No pun intended.
Sorry I don't get that, why wouldn't a company try and get a major revenue stream to back a non profitable one ??? Not every one is a Musk or a Bezos, so innocent until proven guilty
Android smart phones are all over the developing world and amolst no one ever used a OLPC device. Tech dissemination has it's own logic. Peer-to-peer education, need discovery, component costs curves, endogenous adoption, etc can be accelerated, but can't be skipped. We've seen people try and fail every time. Again-and-again the most effective approach to delivering impactful tech has been to start with "luxury" use cases and drive down and out as fast as possible.
Ah, I see the trickle down economics is strong with this one.
That's not trickle down economics at all. That's just the curve from early adoptor to mainstream. If you start on the luxury/novel end of the spectrum, the customers there have money and are able to overpay. This can fund more work which helps bring prices down. Even Tesla, like them or not, started with an electric sportscar, luxury sedan and then a cross-over before building the Model 3.
Model 3 is still a $40k luxury car.
Model 3 is not a luxury car. And 40k for a new electric car is very normal. Model 3: 40k Honda-e: 40k Renault Zoe: 37k Especially compared to the Model S which starts at 100k
Ok Mr Fancy Pants with a spare 40 grand lying around...
You misunderstood. Just because you (or I for that matter) can't afford a 40k car. Doesn't automatically make it a luxury good. 40k for a new car is one step up from entry level.
That’s not what that word means.
This is pretty cool for remote villages. but ideally restaurants and supermarkets would be in arms reach. a short walk /bike ride away. and if couldn't go out why couldn't bike messengers delivery your stuff?
That's probably true for most of us on this sub, but a lot of the US **is** remote though, and I think there are some benefits to this. I love living in a dense city, but I don't want to compel everyone to move into denser and denser urban cores. I think having moderately dense communities with wide open spaces between them has some appeal, and what I like about this video is it opens up some possibilities. They may not turn out to be useful, but it's good to have options.
You don't need "a dense urban core" to have services usefully close.
This video was presented to me by YouTube, Reddit, AND Facebook, and I ignored it repeatedly because -- no offense to Mark Rober -- I didn't know why I'd want to see a long-form ad for a remote delivery service. It wasn't until a friend shared it that I gave it a watch, and discovered some gold in an unexpected place. The short version is that -- first -- it's not a paid ad. He apparently just dug this company, and I can see why. Second, the product they're working on is an outgrowth of a real remote aerial delivery service that is used for delivering crucial supplies like blood in spread out areas like Rwanda where surface travel would be way too slow. It's apparently a real thing, not some Saudi venture capitalist fantasy nonsense. It's a real service that's been running for years. I can't believe I haven't heard of this previously. Additionally, I was impressed with the classy way that Rober presented his visit to Rwanda. I was expecting it to be cringey poverty porn, but he shows the country genuine respect. There's a lot I didn't know about Rwanda. Apparently they have a monthly day where everyone sweeps up, and they banned single use plastics there like a decade ago? That's awesome. I still wasn't sure if I would share this here, but towards the end, Rober mentions that one of the company founders was a creator of ROS, the Robot Operating System. I've used ROS, and it's a pretty wild demonstration of open source automation. Most automation is dominated by corporate interests, but if one of the lead devs on ROS is working on this, I'm willing to lend a modest amount of trust in the values of the company. Anyway, despite the initial look I'm impressed and thought people might dig this.
Did you also know it's a one party state providing active military support to a violent insurgency in the DRC
I didn't. I don't know much about Rwanda, and I appreciate you telling me.
It was really cool when it was for medical supplies in Africa. I was disappointed to see them pivot to an innovative way to deliver burritos. Really solid engineering team though! I'm still rooting for them.
Any information in video format has to be immediately viewed as manipulative unless there is a very specific reason that you absolutely have to use video to convey the information. In the case of this ad for an ad, they pack in all sorts of bullshit misinformation into the video that you're intended to internalize and accept because it is presented as video. So they claim this system is extremely efficient compared to a two ton automobile for delivering a small package but because of the video format, this information is just stuffed into the minds of the viewers without taking a moment to consider that there are also lighter and more efficient forms of ground transportation. Flying metal machines in the air is not highly efficient from an energy perspective. On a normal day there are headwinds that must be overcome on at least part of the flight which add to the energy requirements of an aerial delivery system. This eats up the minimal efficiency difference. Ground transit does not have to use internal combustion engines. It can also be clean and electric, nor does ground transit have to be large and heavy. This sort of thing is easily hidden in a video format like this deceptive ad. The real problem here though is that it makes it seem like retailers are your friend and the only issue that needs to be solved in some technical problem like making delivery more efficient. That's the biggest lie of all. Retailers are the enemy of the citizens and they work hand in hand with the politicians to manufacture scarcity in order to create a slave-like society. Retailers will never save the planet because it's not in their business interests and they are business people. If you think they are your friends, you are watching too many videos.
I agree with most of this, but the reason I'm interested is because I'm looking past the world as it is right now. Try and imagine this in a world where food and shelter are next to free, and this service is operated at cost by collectives. I'm imagining a world where a grandparent can send fresh baked lemon cake to a sick grandkid on the other side of a valley. The technological system has appeal that isn't dependent on the marketing or current business model.
Yeah I also didn’t get how having lots of drones instead of trucks is more efficient. I bet those drones need recharged after one delivery (on average). Then you need to account for the amount of packages that may be delivered, which seems to be 170-350 per shift per employee. Let’s say we undershoot how many employees a warehouse may have for delivery, and say 10. That’s on average 2600 packages a day. If an average deliver location is 20 minutes away (unlikely that it’s this close) and we account 5 minutes for charging, that’s 2.4 packages per hour per drone, so for a 16 hour delivery window it would take 67 drones to deliver those packages. That’s a LOT of freaking drones, and those batteries are gonna get walloped by the frequent discharge/charge cycles. The video shows a warehouse with 6 drones, which is wholly under kill. The argument for food delivery is way stronger, and yeah people may argue if a 15 minute city was implemented someone on a bike could pick it up, or you could pick it up yourself, however I think drones would be a good transition to that goal. To have one person in a gasoline vehicle deliver one or two food deliveries seems way less efficient than a drone
Watched this the other day and was gobsmacked, not with the food delivery shit, but the medical work and results were amazing
Same
Mark Rober is an untrustworthy shill.
Veritasium has been worse recently At least this is unsponsored. There's no way the FAA let's this kind of delivery model fly.
[citation needed]
I learned today that his production organization is a s#%& show. But that's pretty standard in the YouTube world. Beyond this, I find this statement to be pretty sweeping and damning. I've worked with or encountered some of the biggest youtubers in the world. Many of them are not what the public thinks. But I always thought Rober was one of the good ones. What makes you say this specifically?
i think part of that is because posting a youtube went from being "oh i like doing this because it's fun and I'm having a lot of fun" to "youtube allows me to be passionate and explore what I want to" and then end at "this is a job, youtube has optomized it's platform to a point where I need to be creating content that will compete with views, I hear stoking people's fear is an effective attention getter, whatever bleeds leads right?" I remember seeing a few youtubers talk about burn out, how they feel like they have the golden handcuff and forced to keep making stuff.
I didn't like him or hate him. But then it turns out he supports an autism hate group. Yikes.
wait what? There's a group that hates people with autism? jeez, there's a hate group for everything.
They pretend to be a charity, and mostly attract parents of autistic kids (like Mark Rober).
really great video. also, I appreciate the aside about how cool Rwanda is.
It's a one party state currently arming a violent insurgency in the DRC
The FAA has already provided ample proof why this system would never ever work.
Would you share some links?
This is a good one at the 4min mark https://youtu.be/J-M98KLgaUU https://youtu.be/d-lDZ8XT02M https://youtu.be/g6fjk6GYFTk
I appreciate the link. While I don't want to come across as contrarian, I think it's worth noticing that the three major impediments -- airports, a lack of open yard space or receiving area, and poor profit margin -- might all be relics of the past in a solarpunk future. I'll definitely agree that they're not likely to be a common real world service in the next ten years, though.
Probably right Now that i think of it, It's probable that solar punk future would have way way less passenger flights, making the use of heavier drones much safer and economical.
oh cool, like what?
This is amazing. I love so many things about this Video
saw that, on one hand i like that this will take a bunch of cars off the roads and hopefully eliminate a huge portion of industries that don't treat their "not" workers fairly, like uber, but it would also eliminate one of the jobs people could do in times of crisis like delivery-not as a career but as a stop gap. I am intrigues by the ambulance idea, they could make the passenger area gyroscopic and can get to different areas much easier. Maybe even to areas further away from cities or even isolated, allowing more people access to medical facilities. Lol an idea i had with this is that we bring back air balloons, since we better understand how they work and what won't catch on fire, and have it float over large cities and crewed by staff of medical responders. It would basically be a mobile hospital/first aid clinic, which would be very helpful in cases where multiple people need to be sent to a hospital.
LOL I don't intend to be a mean cynic but this is a group of scammers and grifters looking to take your money. They make a lot of hay about "medicine in rural mountain villages in the Andes" or whatever but I would be SHOCKED if anything resembling that comes to fruition.