Action camera make GoPro has not benefited from entering the drone business. In fact, the company is reeling from it:
GoPro hoped its Karma drone would drive growth. Instead, the action camera maker confirmed it's ending Karma production and will cut nearly 300 jobs, or more than 20% of its global workforce.
The company may also be putting itself up for sale: According to CNBC, the company has hired JP Morgan Chase to seek a potential sale. "If there are opportunities for us to unite with a bigger parent company to scale GoPro even bigger, that is something that we would look at," GoPro CEO Nick Woodman told CNBC earlier Monday.
Karma had a disastrous launch in 2016. Only a few weeks after its release, GoPro issued a mass recall of 2,500 units because faulty engineering caused the drones to lose power mid-flight and drop out of the sky.
The drone remained the second most popular of its price class after the recall, GoPro said, but an "extremely competitive aerial market," as well as a "hostile regulatory environment" in Europe and the US made the product's future "untenable."
Also at The Mercury News and Ars Technica.
Related: Ask Soylent: Best Long Range, Camera Drone for under $1K?
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I chair the tech and garden committees at the PTA at my kids' elementary school in Brooklyn, a small, Title 1 (the majority of the families are poor) school with limited resources. A couple months ago the PTA gave money for expensive self-watering planter boxes, flowers, hoses, and other gardening implements to improve the austere, institutional exterior, which resembles a prison. As we discovered this morning, some of the flowers, boxes, and hoses were stolen over Memorial Day weekend.
Since planter boxes must be outside, and the thief must be in the neighborhood to know the boxes are there, it occurred to me that they must be visible from the air and perhaps a camera drone with decent range could be used to recover the stolen property and put a stop to thefts that will surely continue if we merely replace what was lost.
Ideally I imagine flying it from the flat roof of my 4-story apartment building to search in a .5 mile to 1 mile radius, with roughly 30 minutes of flying time and a "go home" feature if it loses contact with the controller or runs too low on battery.
Are there drone aficionados in the SN community who can speak to the feasibility of such a project and/or can recommend models to buy?
[Editor's Comment: Original Submission]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by radu on Tuesday January 09 2018, @10:16AM
Hostile regulations like... only allowed to fly if doesn't
(Score: 5, Interesting) by FatPhil on Tuesday January 09 2018, @12:42PM (1 child)
I really like my current pie, therefore getting new pies is good. That's the limit to their logic.
They should have produced cheaper cameras, and pushed them into more drones, effectively selling rights to use the brand name, in the same way that Shimano did with derailleurs on bikes decades ago.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Tuesday January 09 2018, @08:50PM
So true. There are so many players entering the drone space that the profit margins must be minimal. GoPro already has a strong name in the action camera space and they can maintain premiums for their products. Perhaps they will migrate to this business model in the future.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 10 2018, @05:46AM
Go-pro obviously needed to go onto a Catholic University campus, and diss the fucking Sheriff Roy Clark, offering to service his high-school aged charges, and there would be a lot more comments here. Just saying. His name is not "Roy", btw, if you are trying to google your right-wing rage.