Is Viatek About to Launch the Real Lily Drone?

Over the previous few days, the fallout from the failed Lily drone challenge has began to acquire momentum. We revealed final week that the Lily was again from the lifeless thanks to the Mota Group, who bought the rights to the Lily model at public sale.

On the floor, shopping for the rights to a tarnished model looks as if an odd choice. We tried to clarify why it makes good enterprise sense. More fascinating, although, is who bought the expertise behind the drone that by no means made it to clients. That firm was Viatek. They outbid GoPro, amongst others, to seize the patents and expertise behind the Lily drone.

Today we received official phrase from Viatek – an organization that makes a spread of client merchandise – and the first suggestion is that there’s thrilling information on the horizon.

The News from Viatek

This is the phrase from Lou Lentine, president of Viatek. The daring emphasis is ours:

“We are completely satisfied to announce that Viatek Consumer Products Group has acquired over twenty patents – each design and utility patents, copyrights, software program, tooling and all technical designs and know-how from Lily Robotics. Myself and our engineers have already been to the manufacturing unit to talk about finalizing the product which everybody preordered from Lily Robotics. We have examined over 70 working items and are happy to announce the product is functioning very effectively. I’ve personally taken a pattern to the seaside this summer time the place the drone adopted my household browsing, wakeboarding, spearfishing, fishing, jet snowboarding, and boating. It labored amazingly effectively following the wrist tracker, touchdown, and taking off in water. You can’t try this with different drones,”

Now that is fascinating. The Lily drone failed as a result of it was unable to fulfill guarantees to clients or meet the demand for the hundreds of thousands of ’ value of pre-orders. If Viatek is to be believed, a working Lily drone is definitely loads nearer than we’d have anticipated. In specific, the potential to take off from water and normal waterproof-ness is one thing no different drone on the market can supply.

Having mentioned that, testing 70 items shouldn’t be the basis for a mass market roll-out. Just ask GoPro about that.

Naming the Nameless Drone

The new drone will likely be manufactured and marketed completely by Viatek. According to an announcement from the firm, it will likely be manufactured “with the features everyone wants including, simple to fly with no controller required; ability to land and take off from the water; similar sleek and sturdy design; amazing high-quality photos; great flight time of over 20 minutes; audio recording from wrist tracking device; and some new technology as well.”

Those are some daring guarantees.

The firm can also be providing a contest to title the drone. “We are offering a contest for our new drone on our website,” added Christopher Baumunk, government director of gross sales & advertising. “We will be giving away a free patented drone to the person who names the product formerly known as Lily by Lily Robotics brand. We have already spoken to major retailers around the globe with much excitement.”

You can submit your title and enter the contest right here.

Let’s All Calm Down

Yes, this information of the Lily revival will likely be thrilling for the hundreds of people that put cash into the preliminary firm and its promising drone, solely to be critically let down. However, so far as we are able to inform, Viatek has by no means made a drone earlier than. Even with Lily’s expertise in place and a workforce of expert engineers, making dependable drones isn’t any straightforward feat. We’ll wait till we see this factor in the air earlier than leaping to any conclusions.

There’s little doubt that earlier than Lily was wound up, the firm was on to one thing. There’s no different cause that corporations can be spending large quantities of cash on the patents and prototypes. But having the expertise and crafting it right into a workable product that meets (already built-up) client expectations are two separate issues.

Angelo Ramsbott, VP of worldwide gross sales at Viatek mentioned “We know the technology was sought out by many in the industry, and we are glad that LR Holding, our associated holding company, has been able to acquire these assets. The success of Lily was not about the name, it was about the technology and that is what we own.”

We’ll see about that.