 So, we're at the CBIT at the booth of ETH Zurich right here. We are checking out this Tether drone. Hello, so who are you? Hi, I'm Chris McCall. I'm the CEO of Photokite. What's the name of the company? It's Photokite. Photokite? Yeah. So, it looks like a kite with a drone. That's right. How's it work? Yeah, so what we do is we add a tether to a drone and we integrate the whole system so that it becomes 100% fully autonomous. It flies itself just like a kite. It's a system that you'd be able to hand off to anybody to be able to fly. You can focus on your shot and being a cameraman rather than focusing on flying a drone. How do you focus on the shot? In terms of control, it's super easy. Right now, this is a similar problem. I can tell you by the drone itself. If you want to change the way the camera is looking, it's just a simple joystick right here. So I can go down. Let's turn it a little bit more. So I can get the drone in the background. That's moving the camera right now. Yeah, that's right. So right now, you control very easily where it's looking from side to side as well as up and down. You can get a very easy, quick aerial view. The other joystick actually controls the position. But we can also change where the vehicle is flying. If you want to bring it further down or over to the left, it's as easy as just one quick maneuver. Let's take it for a spin. So if we let out the tether a little bit further, we can get it right out over the aisle, bring it up a little bit, and we've got this beautiful aerial shot of what's going on around us. You can control it wherever you want to be looking. Does it basically always try to get the tether to be straight? Exactly. Yeah, so it's always going to try to maintain the angle relative to you that you give it just like a kite that's in the wind. That's an awesome idea, right? Thanks. So it's your idea? It's the company's product. What we did is we spun off from ETH Zurich as a company and we've been developing this system ever since. Because my dream has been to have a selfie drone. Okay. Is this a selfie drone? It's a tether drone. You can certainly use it for selfies, but we're more excited about the uses that you can put this system up in the air just about anywhere, even over crowds of people and really safely and easily capture that content. So let's get it back closer to us. Sure. Actually, there's another one right here, right? That's our consumer product, yeah. So if you get it closer, how long is the battery right now? Can we get power through the cable? This system does power the system from the cable. So it just flies wherever? Yeah, we started it this morning and we fly it all day long. That's kind of special? It is, definitely. Have you ever heard anyone else do this? You know, there's not a lot of people doing tether drones right now, especially in kind of the light industrial space. We're really excited about the use cases that we're targeting. How much excitement is there thus far, because is this new? It's relatively new, yeah. We released our very first product, the Photokite Pro, just over a year ago, and we've made initial sales to people like BBC, CNN, AFP, and they're using these out in the field for some really exciting news shots. Nice. When we were watching Trump get elected, maybe they had a few of these out there, and they were flying above the crowd very smoothly and basically flying the whole day. Yeah, basically you can plug it into any kind of power source and keep this thing up in the air longer than you can with the traditional drone. Longer, like forever. What's going to fail? When a bird attacks it, that's the only failure point. Boy, you know, we haven't seen that happen yet. And in terms of testing and failure of the system, we've even flown one of these for 52 days straight without a failure. Is it good with wind and stuff? Yeah, so when wind blows in the same direction that you're flying, it actually will use that wind to sail just like a kite, right? That's awesome. How much does it cost? Is there a secret? In terms of our professional system, they're quite expensive. They started around 7,000 euros. For CNN, that's peanuts. Yeah, for a lot of the users, you know, it's all about what kind of value it brings. So let's walk around it over here. Maybe you can come over here and show this one. So you have a consumer version right here. This looks amazing also. Yeah, this is called the photo kite speed. It folds up and fits inside of here. Let me show you how it works out in the aisle here. So once you bring it out of the tube, you just give it a little shape, arms unfold, clip it into place, and when you turn it on, it's ready to go, okay? The special thing about photo kite systems is it doesn't require any kind of GPS signal. It doesn't require any kind of calibration to just be ready to get up and flying. It's kited, it's tethered. It's always tethered, yeah, exactly. This is the controller? Yeah, so this is the leash. And it's got two buttons to be able to control where the camera is looking and where it's flying as well. And you can also control when you take a picture or a video, things like that. But it's not powered with a cable right here? No, it's not. In fact, this one has an on-board battery, just like a regular drone. So that's 10 minutes? It'll fly for about 15 minutes. 15 minutes? Yeah. And how far is the cable? The tether length here goes up to 30 meters. Are you planning to do a power through cable for consumer? You know, so far we haven't seen a big demand from the consumer market for a power over tether solution. If we see one come up, then maybe we'll reevaluate. And have you been using this one? Yeah, absolutely. So I take it up into the mountains where we're based in Switzerland. And you know, take it skiing or biking. It's a ton of fun. You do that? Yeah. And you just pull it right behind you? Just pull it behind you? Yeah. Let me show you how it works. So just like the Photokite Pro, you kind of point it in the direction that you want it to fly. You give it a twist, and the motors will start to ramp up, and then off it'll go. So once it's in the air, it'll hold that same angle relative to me, whether it's right here one meter away or up to 30 meters away. 30? Yeah. Ah, that's so cool. Yeah. And so even right now, we can just start going for a walk with it. You're just walking your kite. And how do you bring it down? You just pull it a little bit? Yeah. So an auto retracts right into the leash here, and that's where all the cable is stored. That's so cool. Is it for sale? Yeah. So we already launched this back in the end of 2016. It was also a crowd-funded campaign over Indiegogo. Now we've already sold out of our initial 1,500 units. 1,500. How much was each? We started off sales at 2.49. And so this mass production is not the prototype right now? No, no. This is fully mass produced. So the 1,500, you ship them? Yeah. So that's 1,500. Yeah. I think a lot of people are really enjoying how they're using it. The people, there's no limit in how fast you move around. Maybe doing sports. You know, our best test so far was putting one of our earlier prototypes into the hands of a professional Swiss skier, and he just blasted down the mountain with it in tow. And it kept right up with him. It was actually a beautiful flight. And it was filming him the whole time? Yeah. It doesn't, does it recognize where you are? So actually that's one of the very special things about the Photokite. We enabled this front area right here to clip the tether into. Nice. And we put it into what we call follow me mode. And that means that wherever you pull the tether from it'll always point the camera at that direction. That's so cool. Yeah. So we kind of get that follow me feature for completely free. Nice. This is the Swiss company? Yeah. That's right. What's next? Boy, what's next is building in more and more intelligence and connectivity into these devices so that they don't become just a hardware device. They become, you know, a much more connected intelligent type of system. Intelligence. Yeah. So we don't want to break off the tether. Well what we don't want to do is, yeah, so right now even now, if the tether does get cut or breaks the system will automatically detect that within half a meter. It'll hover and then softly come down. What I mean is as an option, people can free it and then get it back somehow. Then you would have to need to add a whole bunch of other stuff in there. Your whole point is you want to tether it. That's right. Nice. So that's the ultimate way of doing follow-up drone racing. You know, I think that there are a lot of advantages to the way that we're doing it. And there will be a few other ways to do it as well. But for now we're really quite happy with what we've come up with. You know, it probably isn't made for driving around on the freeway with. But you can do some traveling shots with a vehicle. You can just plug it in and go from 34k to 31k. Yeah, exactly. Cool. Awesome. All right. So how many people in this company? Right now we've got nine people on board. So hopefully there's so much interest that you're really thinking about what to do next. That'd be great, yeah. We're already working on the next things right now.