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The Drone Network explores how drones are reshaping the world. Hosted by Bryce Bladon, the podcast documents the tech, economics and people piloting the world's largest standardized drone imagery network.
Bryce Bladon: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to Drone on the only podcast in the air and on the airwaves. I am your host, Bryce Bladon, and on this show. We explore the tech economics and people piloting the world's largest standardized drone imagery network. Each episode we explore how drones are reshaping industries, creating new economic opportunities, and literally changing how we see the world.
On today's episode, I look into how the world's largest drone imagery network was actually created, tracking its first missions in Canada to covering over 200 municipalities in North America. Today's guest,. Is the operations manager of Spexi Geospatial Inc Graham Anderson. Graham, you've been on the show before, but why don't you give us a quick intro to yourself before we dive into what you've done with Spexi and, uh, the soon to be clarified LayerDrone?
Graham Anderson: Yeah, absolutely, Bryce.
Meet Graham: Ops Manager for the World's Largest Drone Network
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Graham Anderson: Thank you for having me. Uh, again, as you mentioned, I'm the operations manager for Spexi, uh, which really means I [00:01:00] am, uh, what we call supply side focused. So pilot focused, focused on getting pilots into the network, getting them onboarded, getting drones in the air, growing the pilot community, ensuring safe and efficient operations across currently North America, but also growing that community to become a global community, uh, as a long-term vision.
Bryce Bladon: Absolutely. So. Let's set the setting for everyone because something that I had very wrong about the story of this network originally was I was under the impression that, uh, Spexi had kind of been taking its current business model and has been pursuing it since 2018. But in actuality, Spexi's journey for what would become the LayerDrone network, in my mind really started in 2023.
And from 2018 until then, it might be more accurate to position Spexi as a sort of software as a service platform for companies that required aerial data and as a business, Spexi was seemingly succeeding at creating customer demand. Um, but finding supply at that scale was an ongoing challenge, still is for the team and for the platform because people don't just [00:02:00] want an acre of imagery. They usually want the whole city. And things of that effect.
What Spexi is selling here is, uh, what companies want, and giving it to them was a challenge. Consistent high quality data that could be delivered from any consumer drone, but delivering it via on-demand capture and at scale required coordinating... well, even at the start pilots.
So in 2023, my understanding is that Spexi effectively began building their own supply chain of what would become the LayerDrone network, and eventually it would become the world's largest drone network. But my understanding is this all starts around the summer of 2023 with the trusted Alpha.
Can you walk us through that Graham?
Spexi seeds LayerDrone when Bill wants bite-sized pieces of the earth mapped
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Graham Anderson: Yeah, it'd actually take us back, uh, a year and you'd have to go to, to Bill, uh, Lakeland, honestly, to, to get the, the early days story. 'cause I joined in January of 2023. But, you know, the early days of Spexi Bill has always had this vision of sort of breaking the world or the map into some sort of quadrant or some sort of, you know, bite-sized piece.
And then standardizing that data captures so that [00:03:00] pilots could do that. But the technology and the sort of the capabilities and the incentive structures didn't really exist. At the time, bill started Spexi, uh, along with, uh, co-founder Peter Current CTO at the time. So this is around 2018. What, what you're kind of thinking about come 2022 with the release and proliferation of the Mavic minis, smaller, higher quality consumer grade drones, and then their introduction to cryptocurrency and the, the DePIN space particularly.
So the idea of a, an incentive model that could be scaled, uh, rapidly, the pieces sort of fell into place technologically and, and culturally and things like that for, for what Bill's early vision had been. And that was when they, they sort of started their, their seed fund investment pitch, sort of bringing, really bringing the idea into sort of the child or the, you know, the, the baby, the baby stages of, of what it is today.
Um, so, so I would call that 2022. And they raised funds for, you know, something akin to, uh, what we have today throughout 2022. And that seed [00:04:00] round closed, I think in October of 2022. Uh, that was a five and a half million dollar seed round from predominantly cryptocurrency investors to build a, a. Drone imagery deep in.
Um, and I was introduced to the network at that time via press release announcing the, the closure of that round. That was when I first heard of the time what was dub Spexigon. So we've actually gone through a couple of branding changes, um, but they, they released it under the name Spexigon. Does that give you a, an origin story and something to go on from that point and bring us to, to 2023
Bryce Bladon: It really does, you quite literally started with the seeds of this thing in 2022. Um, but take us to 2023. How does that lead to, what were some of the first missions flown for the network, for the trusted Alpha, and what did the trusted Alpha look like in scale? I, I imagine it would be quite a bit different than what you'd see from the network today.
The Trusted Alpha and First Flights on the Network
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Graham Anderson: Oh yeah. I mean there were, were lots of, uh, you know, it's hard, it's hard to decide or imagine and project what. You know, something's gonna look like when a, when a number of drones start flying, sort of at the same time. We, we did, through the first half of [00:05:00] 2023, our engineering team was developing sort of, uh, some of the, the flight mission controls and the mobile application in a very rudimentary form, and our COO.
Uh, Alec Wilson and myself were some of the, the very early, um, test pilots. So I recall, you know, in the spring of 2023 flying some of these, these tests, the, the hexa, the hexagons. Now the H three grid that we used didn't, you know, didn't really show up on the map kind of at all. It only had an outline once you flew it.
There was no... There was no indication that the mission had been completed visually. So if you put more than a couple on the map, then suddenly you'd forget, you know, which, which ones you had flown versus which ones you, you had not. Uh, mission launches were very different so that, you know, kind of, I think it was probably around May, May, June, that Alec and I, and a couple of the engineers were flying these.
These very, very initial test missions, and it was like, will, you know, will the drone even take off? Right? Will our software talk to the, through the SDK, to the drone, and will it control it and will it stay, go to the place that it's supposed to go? And, you know, I, I probably have a notebook somewhere filled with notes from some of those very first tests that I, I [00:06:00] flew off the roof of my garage, actually here in Vernon, BC.
Um, so really, really different at that time. The first, well, what we called the trusted pilot Alpha was, uh, we worked with a team in Cochrane, Alberta, Osprey integrity, so pilots, you know, drone pilots that were professionals. They have a, a drone services company that we've known for, for quite some time.
Alec and myself are professional operators because the, the application was un, un call it unstable. It was very new, didn't always complete. Or, or fly the way that you, you may be expected to fly. So we wanted to make sure people that were using it were experienced operators. They would be able to deal with, you know, the drone losing connection or you know, some sort of issue that they might run into.
That first trusted pilot alpha, we called it at first Alpha was flown over Cochrane. It was about 230 missions, core missions, some, some larger missions. We were actually also talking to the city of Cochrane, so they were interested in the data. One of the other reasons we chose that area, they ran 288, what we call panorama missions and about 30 mapping missions.
Um, they did that over a number of days. We weren't, you know, we weren't in a big hurry. They fitted into their [00:07:00] schedule, but they had to use actually a Google My Maps that we created. So we created an entirely, you know, we took the hexagons and we put them into a Google My Maps and they would use the Google My Maps to inform themselves, like, edit the map and change the color to say, yes, I flew this one. There were about four pilots I think that flew and, and they needed to tell each other. Like, that one's already a bit flown because the application interface didn't identify as it does now, like locked or closed or flown. It was just there, it just existed on the, on the interface.
So they did that over about two weeks. They, they flew all of those, those missions and they were changing the colors and the mime maps and we obviously were collaborating and able to see that and speak with them each day. And, and overall it was, you know, what I considered to be a resounding success. They, they were able to complete. All of the missions, the imagery, you know, flowed sort of as it should.
And the, they didn't have any in incidents or negative issues with the drone. So quite a, quite an experience that took about two weeks and, and it ended in late summer of, of 2023.
Bryce Bladon: So that was just not even a, a dozen pilots yet. That was you, uh, [00:08:00] Alec, COO of Spexi, um, maybe another pilot from the team and then what I'd call maybe community pilots, uh, not to not to diminish their impact, but, uh,
Graham Anderson: Yeah, I mean they, they, you know, they were, uh, professional operators. Uh, you know, I call the user group professional operators who had a, a statement of work and were, you know, they were the first outside of the Spexi company to, to download the application to get access to a link to download the application onto a device and fly the drones via the Spexi application.
And yeah, four, I think four of them maybe flew, uh, from their team. Okay.
Today's flights vs. the trusted alpha
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Bryce Bladon: So, if I am not mistaken, just looking at the network data. Most recently about 700 flights were flown yesterday. 700 missions for the network. How does that number compare to the trusted alpha altogether?
Graham Anderson: Two, three to twice as many in a day as they did in a couple of weeks.
Bryce Bladon: Wow.
Graham Anderson: Yeah.
Bryce Bladon: Um, so that's the Trusted Alpha. So that went in, uh, Cochrane, Alberta, uh, near the sunny beaches of Canada. It's a joke. It's a valley. My mom lives in Cochrane. Fun fact. The... so Spexi and what would become the LayerDrone network start there around June [00:09:00] or August, 2023. City of Cochrane as a customer, we've got about, uh, three or four professional operators as well as a couple on the Spexi team doing all this work.
The Known User Alpha
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Bryce Bladon: This brings us to the open alpha, which I believe pretty much starts right after the, the initial Cochrane uh, campaign. Is that correct?
Graham Anderson: Yeah, about a month later. Uh, and I wouldn't call this one open yet. We were still heavily vetting all of the pilots. We weren't meeting them in person anymore. You know, we didn't necessarily know them on face-to-face.
But they had to, to jump through quite a few hoops, they had to pass a small, you know, uh, quiz that we gave them. They had to provide some, you know, information about who they were. We called it, uh, a known user Alpha. So we went from a trusted pilot's alpha, where, you know, we trust these people, we know them, they're professional operators to, this is a group of people.
It, it, we know who they are. They've provided some information about themselves and they've passed some, you know, they've, they've passed some sort of onboarding steps. Uh, and that was about a month later, [00:10:00] maybe a little bit more. We ran that in Surrey, British Columbia. Uh, 2200, uh, missions. So 2,200 missions.
Quite a lot larger obviously. In terms of coverage area, you know, we're looking at, uh, eight, eight times as many as we did in Cochrane. Uh, 22 pilots that flew. We onboarded, uh, close to 50. Our goal was to get to 50. Who, who could fly, who had access to the application. We wanted 50 pilots that, you know, we knew we got very close to that.
Only 22 ended up flying. And that's a variety of reasons. Some people weren't free those days, some people weren't, you know, weren't available, didn't have the drone ready, whatever it might be. But 22 pilots flew again, uh, a little over two weeks, 18 days or so from the time we, we opened the, the missions launched the missions.
At this point, we do have, you know, one of the changes over that month or six weeks in between the, the two alphas was some UI. That allowed pilots to have situational awareness and see what zones had been flown, not only for themselves but for other pilots. So to be able to see in app where they were operating and which zones they had completed versus which [00:11:00] zones another pilot was, was flying and or had completed.
Uh, this to obviously avoid multiple pilots flying in the, in the same zone at the same time, or being in the same area and not knowing, potentially causing some, some sort of hazard. So, big UI change. Over those, those four to six weeks, and then a launch of 2200 missions, which at the time we had, you know, we just didn't know how it would go.
We, we hadn't met these people in person. We were speaking to them in our Discord server, you know, they had a, they had to sort of report for duty, but then they just went and, and flew. And one of the really early memories that I have was, was two of them actually running into each other at a Starbucks in Surrey.
And, and you know, then in the Discord. Sharing a picture of the two of them, like one's in line and the other one sees that he's carrying a drone and says, Hey, are you doing Spexi? Yeah, I'm doing Spexigon at the time. Are you flying Spexigon? And I'm flying Spexigon. Hey, cool. And they, they sat and had a coffee with one another and it was a pretty cool early, uh, memory and experience from the network.
Bryce Bladon: Cool. Um, so remind me what that stage is, uh, referred to as you had the trusted Alpha in Cochrane
Graham Anderson: and a known user Alpha, we called it
Bryce Bladon: Known user Alpha in [00:12:00] Surrey. This brings us to that, uh, delightful border and the US When did the network make its way into the USA?
Graham Anderson: Actually, prior to jumping into the US we, we ran another known user, alpha in Kelowna, British Columbia. Um, and so interesting bit of learning there.
That was 500 missions, so a little bit smaller than the sury one. Uh, this was an attempt to sort of open up a new geography to understand how, you know. If our ability to attract pilots and, and advertise and, and onboard new users could be replicated in a different geography, right?
So for those that aren't familiar, Kelowna about four hours from, from Vancouver or from Surrey, where the initial alpha taking place. So we kind of went, okay, what, what if we want to do this in another city? Are we able to sort of replicate the results? And one of the interesting things we learned. Was that pilots would, would travel.
So a number of our sury pilots decided to make that four hour drive up to, to Kelowna and to Kelowna and take their gear and, you know, go and earn and fly Spexigons in Kelowna. And we went, oh, [00:13:00] that's, you know, interesting. We, we hadn't assumed maybe that, you know, at these times you're trying to figure out value and pricing and how much does a pilot need to earn and how long do these fights.
Take and what's a reasonable amount to pay. And so the idea that someone might drive that four hours and, and a handful of plasma, maybe two, maybe two or three drove up and you know, you start to hear stories of, oh, I have a friend, so I stayed with him, so it made it worthwhile. Or I just went for the, you know, the afternoon or one night.
And, and so that was an interesting sort of discovery from the, the second, uh, known user, but vetted, vetted users essentially. Uh, and then we jump to the, the US. I'm gonna struggle with timeframes a little bit. My memory might be fuzzy. I'd have to go look at, uh, uh, that first, uh, zone that was ever flown.
And it's actually not too hard because I know where it was. Uh, it was in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And so we went back to our our trusted pilots essentially was, was what we did. It looks like, uh, January of 2024 was was when we flew our first US flights and I do recall getting my own part 107 license 'cause I knew I would want to get down and do some testing.
And US pilots require a part 1 0 7 [00:14:00] license for commercial operations. So we have a bit of a break. I think Kelowna was October of 2023. And then... Uh, we're not into the US until January of 2024.
Bryce Bladon: It's so interesting. Um, quick spell. Albuquerque.
Graham Anderson: A-L-B-E-R Law. I don't know. Q
Bryce Bladon: This is the exact same thing that happened to me as soon as I was taking notes during this chat, so I'm really glad you had the, uh, exact same.
Graham Anderson: There's a Q...
Bryce Bladon: blue screen in your face. And there's a lot of u's, a lot of u's. A LB U-Q-U-E-R-Q-U-E. Thanks New Mexico. We appreciate you being the first, uh, Spexigon in the USA.
Graham Anderson: Uh, that's right. So that was, we went back to our, our MO of using professional operators for our first place in us. So we contracted with, uh, an organization called Alamo Airborn.
Uh, shout out to my man, Yoshi. It's, uh, I believe in Texas, uh, is based, but they have network, uh, group of pilots across the southwestern United States. They're a professional drone [00:15:00] services company, again, with a variety of different capabilities, and we, we reached out to them. I, I had been connected with Yoshi through LinkedIn and social media for a time, and so I said, hey. Looking to do this? Can you, can you help us fly some of these early flights? Uh, again, wanting to make sure that the pilot was someone who was a, a professional operator would, you know, would take all the, the due precautions in, given the, the application was, was still very much in alpha and, and would be able to complete some, uh, test flights for us.
The initial test cities we had identified were actually San Francisco and Austin.
Bryce Bladon: Mm-hmm.
Graham Anderson: But the operator that they selected for the, the project was based out of Albuquerque. So the first zones that we dropped to allow her to just trial the, the application and understand what her operating sort of parameters would be when she, when she went to San Francisco and Austin, uh, we dropped some, some demo test missions over, uh, near her home in Albuquerque.
The network's private beta
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Bryce Bladon: Very cool. Alright, so when does this move from Alpha to [00:16:00] private beta.
Graham Anderson: Uh, that would be then, I guess spring of 24. So we, uh, had this operator from Alamo. Her name was Moni Monica, and she flew about 50 zones in San Francisco. She, she went to San Francisco and we had laid down some missions there, and she, she flew a number of those, although she ran into the, you know, the early challenges of operating in urban environments with tall buildings and all of these things that this started to uncover for us about signal strength and, you know, visual line of sight and a whole bunch of things. So, uh, she completed a number of those, uh, along with some, uh, some smaller projects, side projects for Niantic Labs who we'd been speaking with at the time about collecting some of this imagery.
Then she went to Austin, uh, and did submissions there. Uh, but there were a number of, you know, we, we wanted to see a little more, and I wanted to get a real feel for on the ground flight in these urban environments. So I actually went down to San Francisco in January of 24, January 24, and, and flew a number of zones there and, and spent about three or four days in San [00:17:00] Francisco and wandered around the Mission district and, and, uh, you know, areas like that, that were covered with these zones.
And I knew nothing about them. Good. So it was quite a, yeah, not that I knew nothing, but I had never been, it was my first time going to San Francisco, so it was an interesting experience. Great city. I really, I really enjoyed it and it gave me a, an opportunity to really empathize with, with our pilots. And I understand because a lot of the flying I had done to that point had been, you know, near my home or over my home, very familiar environments, relatively low rise, uh, you know, not a lot of challenging airspace or anything like that.
So that was my first look at an experience with trying to get as many missions as I could in a day. You know, spending a whole day flying versus just an hour or two or a couple of missions. I was getting 30, 35 missions in a, in a day. The, the challenges with batteries, the challenges charging in, in an environment like that, you know, I had a rental car. The challenges of finding parking and moving around the city, deciding whether I should walk for these ones or drive for these ones or when I should move the vehicle or how I should operate at that, at that sort of scale. And then obviously just the urban environment and buildings and, and all sorts of [00:18:00] things like that.
So a really good experience for me. [The US Pilot] hit it then. Wrapped up around that time in Austin and we sort of had our test information from, from the us uh, and then a couple months before we, we went onto the beta that spring.
Bryce Bladon: Great. Alright, so the beta basically goes from the spring of 2024 until, well, I mean arguably now I believe now we are in the public beta.
However, what we were previously describing would've been the private beta and I think one of the major milestones to come outta the private beta, please correct me if I'm wrong, is that this would be the state where the network had gone from effectively those original, uh, few hundred missions in Cochrane to over 1 million acres imaged. Do I have that, uh, timeline on that milestone? About right?
Graham Anderson: Yeah. Yeah. We had a contract, uh, for, you know, one of these sort. Research and development contracts with the government of Canada, the federal government in conjunction with the province of British Columbia. Uh, I may have some of those details wrong.
I don't know exactly who the, the Contractee was or the contract worked, but to, to [00:19:00] fly and collect imagery data from every urban environment in British Columbia. That was both 30,000 missions, uh, through the spring and summer of 2024. And that was what we still called a private user beta. And essentially that meant that you had to come into the only place you could get the the link to download the application. It wasn't live in the play store, so you had to come into our discord. You had to speak to us. You had to kind of jump through a hoop or two. Okay. We had to give you, you know, a specific role as a pilot, and you had to pass a little quiz that showed that you had some idea about flight safety and flight operations.
The network's public beta
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Graham Anderson: Uh, and then we would give you access to essentially the link to download onto your phone, um, so that you could operate. So that's the, for us, the distinction between what we call the private beta and the public beta was the day that the application was launched in the Google Play Store. And essentially that takes control out of our hands.
We now cannot vet the users except with whatever's within the application. So, you know, a little guided tour and some information within the application. But any user at that point in North [00:20:00] America, anyone with an Android phone could download the application and begin operating, which, you know, was for us a a little bit of a, you know, what do you call, it's kinda like letting your teenage kid out to drive your car for the first time, right?
You're, you're not in the passenger seat anymore. You're not, you don't, you know, you don't, they can't communicate with you. They may not be aware that there's a discord. They might not know how to contact you if something goes wrong. Uh, they may not be able, you know. So up until that point, everyone had to be in the discord to get the link so everyone was able to provide feedback. Everyone was able to say, I had this experience. I ran into that I, you know, this was my, my issue or my problem, or this went really well, or that didn't go well. At that point, when we launched it into the Google Play Store, that's gone Now. There are users that are using the application and submitting data, and we have no.
No idea who they are and no, no direct way to communicate with them. So that's the, the distinction for us between private beta and public beta.
Bryce Bladon: It makes perfect sense. And, and when exactly was that? I, if I'm looking at the Google Play Store, right, I've got like late 20 24.
Graham Anderson: Yeah, probably, uh, yeah. November, December of 2024, I think.[00:21:00]
Um, that we went to public beta, so we're just a, a year into that now.
The network's testnet
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Bryce Bladon: Got it. And at this point, aspects of the network were already on what is called Testnet, is that correct?
Graham Anderson: Yeah, they've all right from the beginning, aspects have been on testnet. We originally, well, originally, originally we, we had planned to launch on the flow blockchain, actually the first NFTs that were called flight records at the time, uh, in the, in the private beta.
And you know, the trusted, sorry, private alpha. Trusted Alpha and the known user Alpha, there was actually a two part process to the data upload. So you had to first upload the flight record. So, uh, you sort of did an upload that uploaded the record of the flight, and then you did the imagery upload that verified the, the two pieces together.
Um, but an NFT was created on the Polygon blockchain at that time. So. The initial thought was flow. Then we moved to Polygon. Uh, we have since moved to arbitrary the seia and we plan to launch on base. So it's actually been a, a bit of a migration, but throughout that entire time, NFTs of the flights [00:22:00] have been minted on a Testnet blockchain.
Launching LayerDrone in 2025
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Bryce Bladon: Got. And so this end of the, the year 2024, at this point, uh, if I am reading this data correctly, the network had about, or was approaching 2 million acres imaged, um, uh, throughout the year of 2024. Seven figures had been done just on testnet revenue, uh, for Spexi as a business. And I think this leads us into 2025 where the network is still in public beta, still on Testnet, but the main big thing that's coming is a little something called LayerDrone.
Which was formerly established in April, 2025. Anything you wanted to say on that?
Graham Anderson: Yeah, I mean, I mentioned earlier there was some branding shifts. There were a lot of, a lot of conversations, some of them quite, quite, quite fierce, uh, about, uh, the brand, right? Mm-hmm. Spexi Geospatial was the, the initial incorporated brand that, that Bill Lakeland had begun back in 2018 when the.
Project that we see now as, as the Layer Drone Network was sort of proposed in 2022. The, [00:23:00] the idea for a Spexigon, a zone or unit of work came up, which was this hexagon, you know, provisioned by Spexi and you put those two together and you get a, a Spexigon, a spatial hexagon, or a viewable hexagon, whatever you want.
You know, there were a few different ideas about why that worked. Uh, and we really liked that. We really liked the idea of the Spexigon network and, and that was what it was called from. Late 2022, early 2023 maybe. Maybe close to a year. Uh, then there were some questions about, you know, whether, uh, I don't recall why it came up, but there was a lot of talk about whether Spexi was, it was hard to differentiate between what was Spexi geospatial and what was Spexigon and why were there these two names and what was the difference.
And so the, eventually the decision was made to make everything just Spexi. It was, Spexi was the network, Spexi was everything. The subsequent decision to spin out a foundation that would, uh, sort of be more decentralized, necessitated, uh, a new brand, a new brand, a new way to distinguish between Spexi incorporated the rent seeking entity that would sell data into a commercial [00:24:00] marketplace.
And whatever this network or foundation would be, that would collect that data and build a decentralized layer of high resolution aerial imagery. Those, those couldn't be the same thing. If we wanted to achieve the long-term goals that we had set out for ourselves, there was a requirement that, one, be separate from the other. In, in a, a number of both legal, but then also. Like in, in identification. And so that was the, the impetus for creating the LayerDrone network, uh, which spun out of Spexi was built from some of bey's ip, but essentially was separated into a new entity that will, uh, going forward be the tokenized and decentralized distributed network that collect and house all of the imagery that Spexi then acquires and performs, uh, you know, a variety of different activities upon that data to make it, you know, value added and saleable into the marketplace.
Bryce Bladon: Absolutely. I've always found it extremely useful to think about these things in terms of effectively.
At the beginning of the show, I introduced, uh, Spexi, their founding in [00:25:00] 2018 and how they were really seeking, uh, the demand for their product. And then eventually Spexi sort of took on creating the supply that would drive demand of their product. And what you just told me was in effect, the story of Spexi building its own supply chain.
And moving forward, the LayerDrone Foundation is effectively responsible for stewarding that chain and continuing to grow it as a Spexi has up to this point. Which up to this point time of this recording late 2025, over 5 million acres image, we're approaching 6 million over 175,000 missions flown over 8,000 registered pilots.
Things have grown quite a bit. It's not a straightforward shot like any story, it's like any real narrative. Um, but it's a very interesting one in that Spexi has proven demand of their network. Spexi has proven they can, uh, supply the network, but they are segmenting the demand and the supply in a way that will hopefully allow it to grow exponentially.
We've been talking about this, uh, for well over a half an hour at this point, Graham, and I want to be respectful of your time. Is there [00:26:00] anything else about the story of the network, how it came to be from those, those early flights in Cochrane to where it's at today, um, that you think merit's mentioning or often gets overlooked when you are telling the narrative of Spexi and LayerDrone and, and the world's largest standardized drone imagery network?
The big unlock for drones: standardization
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Graham Anderson: There's two things I'd like to touch on, and you just said the word there, it's standardized. And I think one of the unlocks in the, the drone industry, uh, that Spexi has is shooting for layer, drone is shooting for, uh, that I haven't seen anyone else sort of dial in on, is that standardization is the imagery that we are collecting and that we are offering up for, for sale or for access to is.
The same. And, and what that required was settling on, uh, a sensor type or a drone type. So settling on a specific piece of hardware, settling on a specific standard for the size of, of image capture and the type of imagery that we would be collecting. You know, there are a few, few, a couple of types now, but basically it's, it's two types of imagery that we collect, [00:27:00] settling on, you know, the mission parameters and the payment parameters.
So that piece of, we have one-ish product. That we are building for, and that we offer, that we think is of enough value to enough users, uh, that we can create, uh, a global application that will deliver this data type. So standardization is one, and the other is the pilots, right?
How pilots built the network
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Graham Anderson: This pilot, the pilot community that we have created, that we continue to create.
We couldn't have built what we have built without their trialing and testing and feedback. I mean. Drones have been lost, drones have been, have been crashed. Drones, you know, we, we have had, uh, our fair share of trials and tribulations with pilots. They have been, uh, patient with payment figuring out, you know, we've moved through a few different ways that we, we paid them from early, early on, like literally e transfers, you know, and, and different types of contracting to where we are now with Stripe to moving forward to tokenization.
You know, these, these step-by-step iterations could not have happened without these pilots sort of being these, what, what do you call the early [00:28:00] adopters? Of a new technology right, of being willing to try something that's difficult at times that's frustrating, doesn't work the way that they expect it to work.
That, you know, puts them in, in situations or scenarios where they're approached by the public who is upset, who doesn't like drones, that puts them in, you know, they're, they're traveling, lots of them around the US now, at the, you know, at their own expense, obviously paid for, for the efforts. And then the data they submit.
But, uh, really just a huge thank you to these sort of pioneering pilots in the network across North America that have surprised us and provided feedback and made suggestions that now exist within the, the user interface to say, Hey, you know what would be really nice if we were able to do it this way?
And they continue to do so. And so, uh, we, we are constantly adding to our, our sort of product roadmap suggestions and ideas from that community based on their experiences in the field.
Bryce Bladon: Extremely well said, Graham. Um, I wanna be respectful of your time, but I also want you to play the fun segment at the end of the show if you have time.
Graham Anderson: I do, I do.
I do have a few more minutes. So what are we, what are we playing this time.
Bryce Bladon: Today? We are gonna be playing innovation or idiotic.
Innovation or Idiotic?
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[00:29:00]
Bryce Bladon: Uh, so Graham pointed this statement. I'm gonna tell you two truths and a lie. You're gonna tell me which of those two are actual real world innovations, and which one is an idiotic lie I just made up.
Item number one, Intel set the Guinness World record by simultaneously flying 5,000 drones in a coordinated light show over a single location.
Number two, a Norwegian company uses drones with thermal cameras to locate and rescue, uh, people in avalanches to reduce search times from hours to minutes.
Item number three, Domino's tested pizza delivery drones in New Zealand that kept the pizzas hot by using the built-in warming chambers, powered by the drones battery and offset heat.
Which of these is a lie? Which of these are defining our tech future?
Graham Anderson: Not sure how. You know, you say 5,000 drones, and I'm wondering if you're trying to catch me on a technicality like it was only 4,900 drones. I do believe Intel was, uh, one, you know, one that [00:30:00] shot at a Guinness record at some point, I would believe a, you know, a search and rescue crew might use a thermal camera on a drone.
I don't think that Domino's had a drone where you would put the pizza inside the drone to deliver it. It would be a very large drone and it would be very difficult to do that. So I am gonna say that number. Three is the lie.
Bryce Bladon: Bad news, Graham. Uh, actually the lie was Intel setting that record. So two things.
One, Intel did originally have the record. It was around three to 4,000 simultaneous drones. Uh, my understanding is a Chinese company called High Grade has absolutely blasted this record, at least 5,100 that I can verify. Although I'm seeing reports saying that one of their shows had 16,000 uh, drones involved, which seems like too many, but at the end of the day, I have to be careful with you on the segment.
You know too much about drones. I remember when I tried playing a bunch of annoying sounds and you were like, that's a DGI mini fan, I'm moving it this fast and this sort of cloud cover. And I was like, okay, I can't. I can't.
Graham Anderson: So you got me with that one. Yeah. [00:31:00] That's, uh, uh, I am, I am curious now to see what that Domino's drone looked like.
Bryce Bladon: Uh, I am going to be googling it as soon as I hang up on you. Thank you again for your time, Graham.
Graham Anderson: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks Bryce.
Bryce Bladon: Thanks for listening to Drone On. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Get a new episode every week and leave us a five star review on your podcast app of choice. You can learn more about our sponsors at Spexi.com.
That's SPEXI.com and LayerDrone.org. Find out how you can contribute to the world's largest drone imagery network too. Thanks again for listening.