Egyptian drone startup Drofie has attracted the attention of the Swiss, securing a 25,000 Swiss francs (US$26,000) investment and a spell in the Kickstart Accelerator in Zurich.
The “flying selfie stick”, which launched last year, is the brainchild of drop-out avionics engineer Mohamed Ghaith.
The company is still pre-launch and will use the accelerator funding and the three month incubation to improve its pocket-sized ‘selfie’ drone prototype and to develop the business side.
Egyptian drone startup Drofie has attracted the attention of the Swiss, securing a 25,000 Swiss francs (US$26,000) investment and a spell in the Kickstart Accelerator in Zurich.
The “flying selfie stick”, which launched last year, is the brainchild of drop-out avionics engineer Mohamed Ghaith.
The company is still pre-launch and will use the accelerator funding and the three month incubation to improve its pocket-sized ‘selfie’ drone prototype and to develop the business side.
The drone itself is advertised as having all the elements an aspiring fame-monster might want: an auto-follow mode, smile detection so it knows when to capture a moment, and a panorama shot ability, all controlled through an app.
“Imagine pulling a camera out of your pocket, throwing it into the air and having it follow you around, capturing everything you do. Well, that’s exactly what Drofie does,” Ghaith told Wamda.
The software uses four infrared sensors to avoid obstacles and uses a colour tracking feature to ‘see’ and follow a moving target. Ghaith said most of the proof of concept work was done in Egypt.
