2018 is Moving Fast!
Hey Kittyhawkers!
It’s been almost 3 years since we started Kittyhawk. In that time, we’ve grown by leaps and bounds. What started our as two founders in a basement has developed into a team of eleven people. We’ve logged years of contiguous flight time. And we’ve won the hearts of individuals and mammoth enterprises alike. One of the primary ways we’ve managed to accomplish this is by listening to our customers.
In the past year, we’ve heard some feedback that the plans were not fitting a larger and larger cohort of our users. Our small business segment was looking for more flexibility, particularly those folks with rapidly growing teams. To remedy this, we’ve created the predictably named “Small Business” plan. Add or remove up to 10 people as you see fit, and we’ll take care of all the billing details so that you only pay for what you use. Scale up or down as you like.
Additionally, we’ve talked to thousands of you via text, on the phone, at conferences and at flying events that love Kittyhawk but just don’t need all of it’s powerful enterprise features. So we’ve bundled select premium features for things like DJI imports, sectional maps, and automated flights (more on that below) and created plans called Starter and Pilot In Command (PIC). These give you all the great features you’ll need as a solo-operator and nothing you don’t. Sign up directly from the iOS app and coming soon to Android.
As for our Enterprise plans, we’ve started to bring out some really exciting new features. February 1st, we’ll be rolling out our GraphQL API. This lets your team ingest any of your data in any format you specify. We know that large companies have rigid data requirements. That’s why we built a tool flexible enough to support the plethora of enterprises that trust their drone operations to Kittyhawk.
Finally, we’ve seen a couple of non-five star reviews peppered amongst our five star review solar system because we ask people to sign up before they can use the free version of Kittyhawk. The reason was pretty logical from our side — we needed users to have an account to store their checklists, flights, drones etc. Now, we’ll prompt folks to sign up or login when they try to add those things if they aren’t logged in already. A fun side-effect of this is that Kittyhawk will load much faster now.
Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop — Automation Comes to Kittyhawk
We want to be the center of your drone ecosystem and this is our next step towards doing that. We’ve gotten tons of feature requests to do mission planning and we’re excited to announce that automated flights and mission planning have arrived in Flight Deck on iOS. Now you can plan flights with unlimited waypoints and fly them with the touch of a button. Moreover, you can create automated flights from hand-flown flights. So if there is a particularly challenging route you’d like to automate, have the Chief Pilot fly it first, then anyone else on the team can duplicate it. Flight Planning is available to everyone with a PIC and above account.
Flight Deck on Crystal Sky is Almost Here
We’ve been busy flight testing our new Android version of Flight Deck. It’s getting close to being worthy of having our “K” upon it.
In addition to the full Android version, we’ll be releasing a special Crystal Sky version for our enterprise customers that you can securely download from Kittyhawk servers (As opposed to untrusted third parties like APKPure, etc) with a verifiable MD5 hash. If you’re not a NetSec nerd, an MD5 hash acts like a fingerprint for a file. You can demonstrably say, “I have the same version as Kittyhawk.”
Thank You For Flying With Kittyhawk
Thank you all for continuing to be a world-class community. The product continues to grow leaps and bounds with your support. If you’re eager to build the autonomous future like we are, maybe it’s time to take a look at our careers page. We’re hiring.
Sincerely,
Jon Hegranes & Josh Ziering
Founders, Kittyhawk.io
