A cool concept that needs a place to park
I recently wrote about Amazon’s entry into the drone delivery market. It’s a novel idea (Amazon Prime) that hasn’t quite gone airborne yet. Parallel to that, as more and more people choose to do their shopping online, delivery services like UPS and even the United States Postal Service are literally working overtime delivering parcels to consumers. The potential for Amazon’s drone delivery has wings in as much as it might lighten the load of all those parcels being delivered door-to-door.
Parcels free for the taking
The increase in parcel delivery has also ratcheted up another byproduct of more purchases being made online: More parcel-theft on the doorstep’s of consumers. Enter Package Guard a Frisbee sized product that is attached to the floor on your porch or where your packages are delivered. It can be secured to most hard surfaces and is battery operated and is completely wireless. Setup to your computer and wireless network can be accomplished in minutes.
Humor with a touch of truth
So you’ve got Amazon and its drone delivery market and also Package Guard.
Seems like two separate ideas, but it isn’t too farfetched to think that Amazon could end up acquiring Grabham’s company or the patent. And what’s kind of ironic in all this is that real estate brokerage Century 21 jokingly predicted this technology years ago when it parodied Amazon Prime with a mock “landing pad” for Amazon’s drone fleet to land on when it dropped a shipped at someone’s home.
Fast-forward to here and now and Century 21’s parody has more than a few kernels of truth to it (refer to my story link in the first paragraph). And in case you’ve forgotten, the principal of Package Guard is simple enough: it aims to protect the packages that are delivered to your front porch or entry area of your house. Now whether those packages come from a drone or a delivery truck doesn’t necessarily matter.
According to PackageGuard.com, “If a package is taken off of your porch without your knowledge, the Package Guard alarm will sound and instantly you will be alerted via text message and email.” Of course by then your parcels will be long which is probably why at some point in the future you will also have the ability to have a photo/video sent to you of the person picking up the package via our smart phone app.
Amazon’s drone fleet and a landing pad that doubles as Robocop. Now THAT’s one heck of a combination. Almost makes me want to order something online.
