Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Carlton
What percentage of your business is lost to Google or Bing?
|
Impossible to tell. If a client just wants to look at an area, and not own the image, or makes a print, then the free stuff is great.
If you want to make an accurate print at a specific scale, and not have Google's watermark on it, you need to call an aerial company. And if you want one that is done very recently or on a specific date, you need to pay for a company to do it.
We fly all of Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska, Arkansas. We have been to Florida several times. Heck we flew NASA's Cape Canaveral, at night with a sensitive and crazy expensive IR camera to find heat and water leaks on the roofs of the buildings. That was done for the company that owned the IR camera with a liquid nitrogen cooled IR camera. We flew it in daytime with regular RGB images, and at night with the IR camera.
Drones take all the small projects. Drone companies are often our regular customers. One guy in Denver Colorado, has several clients that are all in the flat part of Colorado spread over many miles. He would have to drive all day long and spend the night in a hotel to get them all. We can do it for him over a long day, flying from OKC.
One drone company got a project to fly out in Cimarron, county at the end of the Oklahoma panhandle, on the border of New Mexico. He realized he would have to get up early and drive most of the day, use dozens on batteries for the flight, and drive many hours home. We flew up and had it done cheaper for him. That job's hardest part was getting a surveyor to drive all the way up, and put down ground targets, and send us the precise XYZ positions.
We can read the target, and tell our computer what the value is and the image is precisely positioned on planet Earth. Then is is easy to derive elevation and position and even make contours. We sell that to the surveyor, and he puts his stamp on it, and double checks the data and calls it a map.