Droning on

I’ve been going on about getting a drone for ages and yesterday bit the bullet and bought one. I walked into Maplin across the road from our office and came out with a Parrot AR 2.0. I certainly got respect from the shop assistants — they had all tried it out and it gets their thumbs up apparently.

Once you’ve opened the box and charged the battery, it doesn’t really come with any instructions so you quickly find yourself on the Parrot website watching tutorial videos which are very good. You download an app onto your phone (it seems to work very well on a Fairphone — yay!) and there’s just a small button on the screen saying “take off”. It does what it says on the tin and very quickly you have a drone hovering in the middle of the room about a metre from the floor and a crowd of coworkers who’ve all stopped doing any work and come over to see what’s going on.

It’s much more sophisticated than I was expecting. I’ve only mastered the basics so far and I’m not yet onto all the things you can do with video or changing the settings to alter its performance. I’m also still a long way from being able to fly it through the screen rather than by sight. Anyway, first impressions very good — lots of things to try out!

What doesn’t make it into an impact accelerator programme

Luni at Fledge has written a great blog post about what doesn’t make it into their programme over in Seattle. We could have written an almost identical list for Bethnal Green Ventures (applications are open for our Summer cohort by the way!). The only thing I’d add is that you can greatly improve your chances by getting in touch before you apply and having a chat with one of our team either face-to-face or on the phone. Just by talking it through with one of us, you’ll get a feel for what our selectors are looking for and things you definitely should include in your application.