K
Kathleen Martin
Guest
Welcome to this final installment of Drone Disruptors. So far, Modern Shipper has sat down with four CEOs from four of the most dynamic startups in the drone delivery space. Each brings something unique to the industry: Flytrex wants to bring drones to your backyard; Volansi envisions being a fly on the wall; Matternet seeks to fly in cities; and Elroy Air prefers to fly between them.
All of those companies have one thing in common – they produce their own drones. But for this week's installment, we take a look at a company that's disrupting drone delivery not with its drones, but with ... a mailbox?
"I just think that people are gonna be amazed how they ever got by without a DroneDek because of all the functionality that we're going to deliver," Dan O'Toole, chairman and CEO of DroneDek, told Modern Shipper.
DroneDek's so-called "mailbox of the future" is equipped with security, communication, heating, and cooling technology and a host of other features to give drones the thing they need most – a good place to land. This week, Modern Shipper sat down with O'Toole to talk residential deliveries, hot wings, and the iPhone.
David Versus Goliath
To get to where they are today, O'Toole and DroneDek had to fend off some of the most powerful and influential companies and organizations in the U.S. It all started when O'Toole was driving through rural Indiana on the way home from a business trip in Chicago. He looked out his window and saw a drone hovering over a cornfield on the side of the road.
"I was daydreaming and I just started thinking about drone delivery. And then I thought, OK, the drone's the easy part, the glamorous part, right? But where's all this stuff gonna end up?"
By this point, O'Toole only had about 30 minutes left on his drive, and he frantically tried to latch onto the ideas floating around in his head. As soon as he got home, he got to work.
"By the time I walked in my house, my wife was there and I just ran by her going, ‘I gotta get to my office real quick.' So I ran down there and I just started debriefing myself on my computer," he recounted.
In the past, O'Toole had been beaten to the punch by some intimidating competition. He was shut out of one product idea by General Motors, which filed for a patent several months before he did, and Sony undercut him on a second idea by just a month. This time, though, O'Toole wanted to taste victory. He didn't conduct a patent search or file a provisional patent – within one week of coming up with the idea for DroneDek, he had filed for the real deal.
Fast-forward three years and O'Toole got a call from his patent attorney. Bad news, the attorney told him; he'd have to write a check because his patent had been approved. Eureka! But once it was issued, O'Toole discovered something even more remarkable. He had beaten Amazon to the patent by just nine days and the Postal Service by just two weeks. O'Toole had taken a risk rushing his creative process to get the patent filed, but he had finally gotten his win.
Continue reading: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/drone-disruptors-dronedeks-mailbox-future-163859642.html
All of those companies have one thing in common – they produce their own drones. But for this week's installment, we take a look at a company that's disrupting drone delivery not with its drones, but with ... a mailbox?
"I just think that people are gonna be amazed how they ever got by without a DroneDek because of all the functionality that we're going to deliver," Dan O'Toole, chairman and CEO of DroneDek, told Modern Shipper.
DroneDek's so-called "mailbox of the future" is equipped with security, communication, heating, and cooling technology and a host of other features to give drones the thing they need most – a good place to land. This week, Modern Shipper sat down with O'Toole to talk residential deliveries, hot wings, and the iPhone.
David Versus Goliath
To get to where they are today, O'Toole and DroneDek had to fend off some of the most powerful and influential companies and organizations in the U.S. It all started when O'Toole was driving through rural Indiana on the way home from a business trip in Chicago. He looked out his window and saw a drone hovering over a cornfield on the side of the road.
"I was daydreaming and I just started thinking about drone delivery. And then I thought, OK, the drone's the easy part, the glamorous part, right? But where's all this stuff gonna end up?"
By this point, O'Toole only had about 30 minutes left on his drive, and he frantically tried to latch onto the ideas floating around in his head. As soon as he got home, he got to work.
"By the time I walked in my house, my wife was there and I just ran by her going, ‘I gotta get to my office real quick.' So I ran down there and I just started debriefing myself on my computer," he recounted.
Immediately, he began putting ideas into words and images: a heating and cooling cargo area, a notification system, a charging station, a motorized sliding door.
In the past, O'Toole had been beaten to the punch by some intimidating competition. He was shut out of one product idea by General Motors, which filed for a patent several months before he did, and Sony undercut him on a second idea by just a month. This time, though, O'Toole wanted to taste victory. He didn't conduct a patent search or file a provisional patent – within one week of coming up with the idea for DroneDek, he had filed for the real deal.
Fast-forward three years and O'Toole got a call from his patent attorney. Bad news, the attorney told him; he'd have to write a check because his patent had been approved. Eureka! But once it was issued, O'Toole discovered something even more remarkable. He had beaten Amazon to the patent by just nine days and the Postal Service by just two weeks. O'Toole had taken a risk rushing his creative process to get the patent filed, but he had finally gotten his win.
Continue reading: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/drone-disruptors-dronedeks-mailbox-future-163859642.html
