With his first drone flight, founder and former CEO of Hailo Jay Bregman, knew he'd found his calling. "I knew that I was home, this was the future and for once I was right on time, " Bregman told the audience at WIRED2014.
From parcel delivery and taxi cabs it has been, he acknowledged, a pretty circuitous route. Bregman's love for invention and experimentation with the mechanical began young. "I got interested in the principles of combustion and the mechanics of smoke detectors at an early age -- as the local fire department can attest," he said. "Then I tried to make rockets -- didn't manage to retrieve a single one. So if you used to live in New Jersey and a rocket landed up in your backyard, I'm really sorry about that."
But then computers came along. And Bregman spent the next several years trying to take the offline world,online. "But there is something you can't capture. It's why music fans still love records," he said. "This is not nostalgia -- these are ultimately human services."
It's something he realised when using his own app, Hailo. "The beauty of Hailo is the drivers and all of their stories," he said. "I was trying to get through London on a Thursday night. And the GPS would have taken me right through the centre, but I got in and my driver said, 'I'm going to do a double bridge run, across Suffolk, drive along the river and then you shoot back up.' Now I love a double bridge run. That was the important experience, it was the driver, the stories, and, of course, the route."
Earlier this week Hailo announced that they were pulling out of North America, at the same time Bregman departed from the company. "It's always a tough thing to understand when your business model is going to be more appropriate to a particular location or not," he explained. "That's the lesson I took from Hailo."
Bregman's mind is already firmly on other things however. A technology that he truly believes will be not only be appropriate, but revolutionary, for any location. "I believe in ten years time this room will be filled with drones, and robots will be as common as traffic along the embankment," he said. "I believe we are witnessing the dawn of something incredible. The internet brought us together, mobile gave us legs, and robots will give us wings."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
