GoPro Could Go Robo With Consumer Drones Launching Next Year

GoPro is working on a lineup of consumer drones to supplement its action camera lineup, according to the Wall Street Journal. The new product category would offer aerial drones like the Parrot Bebop and DJI Phantom and Inspire 1. The drones would reportedly retail in the $500 to $1,000 range, and come with GoPro action camera tech onboard, which is a natural fit given that outfitting drones with GoPros is already a popular option among hobbyists and videographers.

Drone sales could help GoPro diversify its product lineup, too – right now it has the majority of its eggs in one basket, with its action camera line. GoPro has done a terrific job of creating a vibrant first-party accessory lineup to accompany its core camera offerings, but many established camera makers are entering the market, or else focusing on improving their existing efforts. GoPro has made the right moves to maintain its leadership, with a new entry-level Hero camera that costs only $129.99, but achieving an early foothold in the burgeoning consumer drone market could make a lot of sense, given its existing popularity in that realm.

WSJ’s information pegs the launch window for these devices at “late next year,” which means I likely wouldn’t anticipated seeing them ahead of holiday 2015. GoPro will also have to offer something that differentiates it from the competition – both Parrot and DJI, two market leaders in consumer aerial drones, have launched next-generation hardware with advanced camera features, including advanced onboard software image stabilization and 4K recording. Drone-makers like DJI also seem to be increasingly interested in including their own camera hardware built-in to drones, which likely allows them to up the average asking price.

GoPro can stand out not only by promoting the use of its tried-and-tested industry-leading action cam tech, but also by offering price benefits compared to some of its potential competitors. The DJI Inspire 1 retails for $2,800, for instance, so if GoPro can offer optics with similar quality on drones that retail for less than half, it could stand to grab a much wider market.

We’ve reached out to GoPro for comment and will update if we receive any additional information.

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document? That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the docum...

Build Your Own Awesome Personal 3D Avatar with Avatara

Do you use social networks and want to build your own awesome 3D avatar? Maybe you want to send someone a cute cuddly image of yourself (kind of)? Or maybe you have your own ideas of what you would do with an Avatar… Well look no further than Avatara which I discovered from the MakeUseOf directory . You can create 3d avatars out of pre-set up templates or create your own from scratch. To start, visit Avatara’s homepage . You will see this screen: Click Get Started to umm, get started! That will take you to this screen: You see that you can build your own Avatar using an uploaded head shot like the Obama one above (just an example, guys). Or roll with one of their awesome avatars. I chose to start with a blank avatar by clicking Start with a blank avatar at the bottom of the screen. That takes you to here: I clicked on the filter at the top and told it to filter out everything but male characters and then I saw this: I rolled with Buck and continued. You need to click Select...

Ex-Skypers Launch Virtual Whiteboard Deekit

Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a...

Kiran Upadhyay

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