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Comment by semi-extrinsic | Hacker News Reader

Color me unsurprised. They marketed it as an action-sport-filming drone, but the top speed was utterly inadequate for essentially all actionsports where drone filming would be cool. It literally wouldn't keep up with Usain Bolt running the 100m, nevermind a regular person on a bicycle.

Shameless plug: a friend of mine is one of the founders of a competing startup making a self-filming drone that has more than twice the top speed, so is actually usable. They've been shooting on location with top athletes using pre-production models for the past year, first production models are going to final assembly these days.

https://www.staaker.com

Edit: s/full disclosure/shameless plug/ as per discussion below.

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I really don't like when people use "full disclosure" as an excuse to advertise.

I think HN as a whole has way too much self-promotion going on.

It's especially grueling when people preface it with stuff like "shameless plug" or "not to push my own product, but..."

I find the self-promotion on hacker news about a million times more interesting than yet another discussion about Elon Musks latest ridiculous idea.

Really? I'd rather read about the ridiculous ideas of a person who simultaneously runs an electric car company and a space rocket company, than about some unimaginative CRUD startup that is "Facebook for X".

Maybe I'm reading different parts of HN than you are, but I see surprisingly few "Facebook for X" startups mentioned here.

That's true. Maybe I should have said "yet another JavaScript framework."

2nded

I agree, and I apologise. Wrote the post quickly, and the second part went more towards "shameless plug" than what I thought about when I typed "full disclosure". Edited now to reflect this. (And for the record, I have no involvement, just a friend of mine is doing this and I think it's cool.)

> the top speed was utterly inadequate for essentially all actionsports where drone filming would be cool.

This wasn't the reason they failed, though. They sold plenty of units, they just never delivered them.

Slow drones can be great for filming parkour runs, where the runner doesn't make a lot of forward progress but instead has a lot of vertical motion through interesting environments. e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS1itQxzAc4 had bits that were filmed with a DJI phantom, which isn't a terribly fast drone. Something slow with great obstacle evasion and auto-following would be perfect for parkour (not sure if Lily was supposed to have either feature, though).

Still, I'm sure that you're right about the vast majority of action sports.

There are many drones on the market that have high speeds and can follow you. AirDog is one of the well known ones, can go up to 42 mph, costs $1600.

The cool thing about Lily was the waterproof aspect. There are very few of them that aren't toys and aren't very expensive at the same time.

And there is one fewer now

No, there never was.

Lily also promised enough 'coordination' to track an athlete from multiple angles over varying terrain and obstacles. That's a much taller order than "follow me", and it doesn't look like they ever managed to get something that could track a skier or kayaker the way they implied.

See how your tag line "Now you can finally be in front of the camera, and not behind it" sounds now with respect to your comment

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