AngelPad’s 6th Batch Of Startups: Companies Working On Drones, Storage and More | Hacker News Reader

AngelPad’s 6th Batch Of Startups: Companies Working On Drones, Storage and More

techcrunch.com

Truly Wireless, Fieldwire, and Boxbee look pretty interesting. Boxbee's name might be slightly confusing (Boxee is a video appliance), but they're in pretty separate fields.

I'm kind of confused why DroneDeploy is specifically non-military; it seems like there is just as much ITAR compliance either way, and even if they don't market to military, I don't see much difference between selling to the Army Corps of Engineers for a civil engineering project in the Gulf/Mississippi/etc. vs. selling to an NGO operating in a warzone.

Why do you say they are specifically non-military?

I work at a company that deals with ITAR (albeit I'm an engineer and hence with limited knowledge about these regulations). We deal with this kind of technology and only a small part of it needs to be ITAR compliant, if at all. If you are working specifically for the military as a (sub)contractor, ITAR restrictions could become more important.

The main part of a drone that I think could run the risk for being controlled is a high-precision IMU. I doubt any other stuff would need to be under ITAR. And if the application is not military, you could probably get by with an off-the-shelf IMU.

All the press about them leads off with "non-military".

Friendly Wikipedia look-ups for those Not In The Know:

* ITAR is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations)

* IMU is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_measurement_unit

At least I had to look these up.

I had assumed that they were emphasising "non-military" to avoid association with the bad press armed "drones" have been getting.

I can't find anything stating one way or the other but potentially it's a moral issue? The reason drones have received bad press is because they're being used for extremely dubious purposes. I can totally understand if they'd want to distance themselves from that. It would be great to see a company who could easily branch out into military applications putting ethics before profit.

I'm excited about Iterable, as both a user and developer. Some companies (foursquare, amazon, okcupid) do a really good job around smart emails/notifications; whereas smaller ones tend to err on the side of spamming.

For example, OkCupid will email you when it's raining in your area because statistics show it's the best time to find a date, and Amazon will stop sending you daily emails if it sees you're not reading them.

It'd be awesome to see intelligent/contextual emails become the average rather than the exception.

A bit confused; the TC article says all of the startups in the current batch are B2B, but Boxbee seems to be B2C. Am I missing something?

I think they meant no big ad sponsored free b2c

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