http://fortune.com/2014/10/08/drone-nation-air-droid/

In demand by Fortune 500 companies and heavily funded by Silicon
Valley, unmanned aircraft are rapidly invading the world of business.

We’re taking the drone out for a spin. It’s a sun-drenched Friday in
Indianapolis’s Broad Ripple neighborhood, and though it’s late afternoon the
wind hasn’t picked up. Perfect flying conditions. T.J. Johnson, 29, co-founder
and chief engineer of a local consumer drone startup called AirDroids, kneels on
the untrimmed grass in the middle of a city park. He unzips a small black
carrying case no bigger than a regulation football and extracts an almost-final
version of his company’s sole product.

The Pocket Drone—a collapsible, three-rotor aerial vehicle—folds up small enough
to fit in a backpack easily, but its three independent propeller motors are
powerful enough to carry a GoPro camera. Johnson and his partners think it could
be the first in a huge, new category of personal electronics—the small, easily
portable flying robot that goes everywhere with you to capture overhead imagery
on demand.

In a few swift motions, Johnson snaps the rotors into place and connects the
battery. Stepping back a few paces to give the machine clear passage to the
airspace above, he taps in some guidance “waypoints” onto the satellite image of
the park displayed on his Android tablet. Then he gives the command to fly. The
propellers whir to life, and the drone zips into the air with startling speed,
hovering for just a moment directly overhead before streaking off to
autonomously execute its flight plan. As we watch it soar, we’re updated on the
drone’s progress via a female robotic voice emanating from Johnson’s tablet:
"Waypoint one … waypoint two …"

Johnson’s company has achieved liftoff almost as quickly as his invention. Along
with co-founders Timothy Reuter, 37, and Chance Roth, 40, Johnson developed a
rough prototype of the Pocket Drone and put it on Kickstarter in January. The
partners were hoping to raise $35,000. But they ended up getting $929,212 in
just 60 days to produce roughly 1,800 drones. Pre-orders on the AirDroids site
have pushed sales still higher, to some $1.2 million. “To do a million? We felt
like we really had something here, but we were definitely surprised,” says
Johnson, an engineering major in college who has a day job as an
intellectual-property attorney. “None of us were expecting that kind of demand.”