The Internet of Flying Things: Q&A with David Merrill, 3D Robotics
RE.WORK
David Merrill is currently VP of Product at 3D Robotics where he works with his colleagues to build tomorrow’s easy-to-use flying robots. He’s also former president and co-founder of Sifteo, a San Francisco startup spun out of his research at the MIT Media Lab, was listed as one of Fast Company’s most innovative companies in consumer electronics in 2012.
We caught up with David ahead of his appearance at the Internet of Things Summit this week
What is the greatest opportunity in your industry to positively impact business and society?
Build things that really matter – the greatest opportunity for positive impact is to make products that give us humans new powers to understand the world and each other, to learn new things more quickly and fully, to get places more easily – those are just a few examples.
What challenges does integrating IoT entail?
The biggest challenges in IoT are “what” and “why” – what should we make, and why should we make it? We often get stuck talking about the “how” – trying to figure out the plumbing of IoT (protocols). That’s a distraction. I believe that starting from user stories is the best way to begin – what do people need that they don’t have?How can we encourage a more bottom-up approach to IoT applications and innovation?
1. We already are enabling this – hardware and software toolkits have proliferated recently, and there are lots of small teams of motivated, bright designer-engineers working on IoT applications.
2. We need to inspire the teams with incitements to focus their energy on the biggest problems – perhaps we need an XPrize for IoT.
David will be speaking at RE.WORK Internet of Things Summit in San Francisco this week, on 6-7 November. For more information & to register, visit re-work.co/internet-of-things
Join the conversation on Twitter with @merrill & @teamrework using #IoT2014
