Scott Anderson

Weekly Roundup (12/7/13) : Amazon can drone on about flying delivery, but the BoP will be the first beneficary

Here at NextBillion we love the merger of business and technology to create a meaningful improvement in people’s lives. (We’re geeks that way).

As intriguing as the Amazon drone, the Prime Air, was in its reveal (let’s call it what it is: a publicity stunt) on 60 Minutes, count me among the skeptical. As Nish Acharya explains in Forbes, Amazon is about to fly its delivery drone into hotly disputed airspace controlled by federal, state and local agencies. I’m thinking there will prove to be way too many regulations for drones to take off (pun intended) at least in the short term.

But while drones – also referred to as “unmanned aerial vehicles” (UAVs) – are still a very dubious prospect for commerce in the United States, they could serve other purposes at the BoP. I’ll bet one will deliver emergency medicine, vital equipment, or agricultural necessities like seeds and/or other supplies in developing regions before it drops off a five pound package to an Amazon Prime customer’s doorstep.

In fact, this week saw the launch of another first drone, by the United Nations. The unmanned (and unarmed) UAV is monitoring the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, tracking the movements of armed rebel groups and the broader populace. Peter Singer, director of the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence at the Brookings Institution, told Wired that drones are here to stay, and that it’s not at all surprising that an organization charged with peacekeeping would deploy them.

“There are so many ‘debates’ now where the people call themselves ‘pro’ or ‘anti’ drone, which is like being pro or anti computers, quaint but irrelevant,” Singer said. “It’s all about how you use the technology, not the widget itself.”

So how could we use drones for poverty alleviation, and could they represent a new network for commerce in infrastructure-depleted regions? The often-cited “last mile,” in development terms, is more than just a mile – and crossing it involves more than just traversing the closest hill. While poor or non-existent roads are the weak links in supply chains for medications and other temperature-sensitive goods, for UAVs, these issues are easily surmountable.

“If it can be sent in 30 minutes or less, pharmaceutical companies may not have to deal with refrigeration. It could also remove some of the challenges in having to store medication,” Melissa Ip at Social Enterprise Buzz noted earlier in the week. “Even without addresses, delivery could be made possible by GPS. Mobile penetration rates are high, and increasing, in rural areas across the developing world.”

That’s the value proposition offered by Matternet. In a recent TED Talk, CEO Andreas Raptopoulos said that he believes Sub-Saharan Africa and other isolated corners of the world could sidestep the billions of dollars in investment and upkeep required to create a road infrastructure – and he compared this potential to what’s happened with mobile technologies.

“Many of those nations have excellent telecommunications today without ever having to put copper lines in the ground,” he said. “Could we do the same for transportation?”

Raptopoulos’ solution is an electrically charged UAV that can carry a 2 kilogram payload over a 10 kilometer range in roughly 15 minutes. By his math, the cost of transporting a 2 kilogram item about 10 km would be 24 cents, including 2 cents for the energy required. Raptopoulos envisions a network of ground stations where said vehicles would charge up and pick up loads, and a routing software system that would largely automate it.

The Palo Alto, California startup, which is a Singularity University Labs company, has been seed-funded by famed tech venture firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Although it’s still early days, last year Matternet conducted field tests in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, where a drone delivered medication to the Port-Au-Prince Petionville camp established after the 2010 earthquake.

“Imagine one billion people being connected to physical goods in the same way that mobile telecommunications connected them to information,” Raptopoulos says.

That buzzing tells me we won’t be imagining for very long.

In Case You Missed It … This Week on NextBillion

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What’s Game-Changing in Latin America?: How new financial technologies and business models are powering financial inclusion in the region By Alina KoganAccion

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