Those of you who cannot wait for your Amazon-purchased goods to be shipped by regular mail may have a new option in the next few years: Drone delivery. Because there aren’t enough drones flying around all up in your grill—only now they might actually find themselves in your grill. The one in your yard.
This story is making huge news on Twitter, with many folks announcing their impressions of what the tech equivalent of Amazon storks would look like. One wondered how long before one gets shot down…or how long before one shoots back. Someone else mused about the potential for downed power lines, fires, crashes, and all kinds of craziness. Another just invited everyone over to their house for some “skeet shooting.” Twitchy has a pretty hilarious list of tweets, as always.
Have we really come to such a point in our society that we NEED things from Amazon in 30 minutes or less? We can get books on Kindle (or iPad, or web). We can download music. What could you possibly need from Amazon so bad in the next half hour that you need a freaking drone to land on your porch? Considering NSA never met a piece of software it didn’t want to backdoor, I doubt very highly that having drones in your neighborhood is a good idea. But hey, I do need a new hobby.
PULL!
GWB says: One person on HotAir suggested B&N will soon have drones shooting down the Amazon ones as an extension of the Nook v Kindle wars! Hah! Bring it, baby!
Kate says: And how is this a good idea how?
GWB says: I want my pizza delivered this way. The driver wouldn’t have to navigate the chockepoints around where I live and wouldn’t be stopped by one of the drawbridges going up.
You program it with all the streets in the delivery area, use a GPS navigator to get to the house, then a visual recognition system to confirm the address and go to the front door, text the recipient that you’ve arrived. You could even put a little credit card reader on it. You fly it about 35-40 feet in the air (AGL) down the roads – that generally avoids overhead phone/power lines (and you can program any aberrations) and oncoming trucks. You light it up with the company logo on the bottom.
The biggest problem is you would need a fleet of them, since you couldn’t make multiple deliveries with one drone.
I could see this especially for places like northern Maine where pizza delivery was pretty restricted. Nah, I won’t drive out with your pizza (especially not on snowy/icy roads in the dark), but I’ll send a drone! You supply the GPS coordinates and I’ll deliver! (Heck, you could get pizzas delivered where you normally can’t! “No I don’t have an address, but I do have GPS coords. Yeah, I’m in the orange tent.”)
You just have to worry about Papa John’s and Domino’s getting into a delivery war and weaponizing their drones. 😉
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