Lessons we have learned from Flying Cars & Succotash.

What a grand desire and wonderful idea the Taylor Aerocar is, was and never will be. Let me start with a Mea culpa. I started working on my Pilot Certificate at age 15 and had my solo certificate about the time I was old enough to drive a car, so I love all things aviation!

Mr. Taylor was an aviation engineer, medal of honor holder, inventor, tinkerer and WW II Navy Pilot so it is no surprise that he would bend toward blending the best of both worlds. What came of that in 1949 was his version of a flying car. Interestingly enough the confusion on these vehicles started with the name. Mr. Taylor called it a Roadable Aircraft, never a flying car! The press and the public thought Flying Car sounded a lot sexier.

Taylor’s dream was to be able to drive the ugly little bean shaped 4 wheeler out of the garage, twist a few quick connects to attach the wings, drive (or is that taxi) to the nearest 1,000 foot long clear flat road (or is that runway), floor it and off we drive(or is that fly) to the highway in the sky.

I can pretty much cut to the lessons learned at this point due to the fact that 70 years later you didn't fly to work this morning and you didn't see your peers flare for a landing at the far end of the parking lot either.

The fact is when you try to blend many functions into one device, you seldom get the best of both worlds and often get the worst of both. Side bar; whoever blended Corn and Lima Beans together knew they were just ruining perfectly good Corn, so they named it Succotash to fool small children and old people!

Cars are heavy and aircraft must be light, so the Aerocar seated JUST ONE! It flew slow and drove even slower and only flew in fair weather and wasn’t exactly ROBUST! Cars are pretty robust but personal airplanes are rather dainty affairs, made of very lightweight aluminum because the steel that makes a car sturdy would make an airplane too heavy to leave the ground. So the Aerocar had terrible capacity, was rather frail, wasn't fast on road or in the air, and still needed a runway to leave or arrive. Power lines, auto traffic, signs and bridges make roads a really BAD place to land an airplane so there went that convenience “land on any road” argument.

Fact is, Millions of investor $$ were Lost, only 6 Aerocars were ever hand built and the Aerocar and all the efforts since have never made it into production. Today it wouldn't pass any safety standards for car or airplane. Dozens of aspiring innovators have raised millions of dollars with fanciful drawings and engineering thesis explaining how the new and improved magic dust of their new design is going to work where others all the have failed.

But it made a great splash in all the media of the day; magazines, newsreels, radio and trade shows. It was all the rage and the next great thing. Fact is, when you ask a product to do many things well, often they do none of them well. Take Fanny Packs, Succotash, Helicopters, Chevy El Camino, Harrier Jump Jet, Frozen Gourmet Dinners, Even the Great Michael Jordan wasn't much of a Baseball Player and Measuring Apps on phones using pictures to measure your home or business all fail to get it right.

The fact is, I have a great Swiss Army Knife that will do all matter of amazing things but I tend to use it mostly to open the mail. You and I both have many tools and apps that seemed like great ideas that are now relegated to that apps page for the stuff we seldom use. And to be straight up honest, I have an ax to grind here. We are in the Professional Residential, Commercial and Industrial Measuring Business, TheMeasurePro.com so I am well informed but more than a little biased, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong

Many are the phone apps being hawked and counted on to do wonders and miracles in the measuring world. The fact is, Many of todays wonders will be relegated to a seldom used gadget page on your phone. Unfortunately, trying to measure complex areas with more than one room, floors, walls, windows, doors and STAIRS with something the size of a phone screen, will only make you hate your phone and curse the idea of doing complicated things with simple tools. The thought that any Pro will depend on a phone app for accurate measurements is laughable. I talked with the president of a company last week and he has a really cool photo based phone measuring app, but it can only do One room at a time and measurements are only expected to be accurate within 3 inches!

The fact is these tools; much like the Aerocar and Succotash are being asked to do many things well and as we have seen that is often a recipe for not so great a performance. There is a reason there is no such thing as a Corvette Station Wagon or a Ferrari Pickup Truck, and we all want Steak cheap but no one wants a cheap Steak!

Many are the dot com marketing groups working on a single product that will do many things with one pass. Visualization, Collaboration and Data Gathering. But those things all have different needs and values, often at crossed proposes and values. Many apps have much in common, just as Dogs, Chairs and a Dancing Couple all have 4 feet, but that doesn't make them interchangeable or complimentary or much use to each other.

The long and short of this is, Phone Measuring Apps are gadgets that are great for estimating the measurement of single distances. The snazzy Visualization tools like Matterport, Picture Perfect and others are ten kinds of sexy but the camera is slow, expensive, only good for one thing and the processing of the images can take days and the measurements are not accurate and often require hours or days of 3rd party rendering and often can’t fit multiple rooms together.

Other phone tools and apps seek to allow collaboration by allowing you to gather images, then cut out what you want to replace with various products. You know, cut out the ugly old carpet and replace with hardwood, tile, rugs or change the wall covering or cabinets. but the measurements are unreliable.

Our whole premise at TheMeasurePro.com is simple. Gather all the measurements into a data Base, create great as built 2D & 3D Blueprint quality and data. Then store all that so we don't have to go back to that house every time the customer needs a QUOTE.. Aggregate all those in a searchable file so we can save time, money, energy and effort and make whatever we sell more convenient for you and your customer. That's what TMP is all about.

Taking a picture of a real room and converting it to real and accurate measurements is surprisingly difficult and problematic. The biggest problem is the furniture and the blind spots.. Think about it, look at any picture of a room in a real home or office. What don’t you know about what’s in that blind spot behind that couch or around that corner or just out of the frame. We all know what happens when we assume. And that adds to the rendering time and the cost and adds to the inaccuracy of photo based estimating. I’m a flooring guy and what is on and under the current flooring (out of sight) could bite you big time! Ask any installer that showed up at a job thinking it was a wood sub-floor and found concrete or old ceramic tile. Same with a dry wall surface that wound up being plaster over brick. That’s a costly OOPS!

Don’t get me wrong, I’m the first to embrace new technology when it does a better job. That’s why TheMeasurePro has stuck with what works, “trained people based and smart technology supported”. The industry has tried with sonic, microwave and stationary lasers, but the fact remains, the most affordable, versatile and highly accurate option is what we call a HUMAN with laser in hand performing the data gathering. TheMeasurePro laser based system offers you High Quality, Accurate, Data Gathering with 2D & 3D As-built Blueprint Drawings. That’s why we say that TheMeasurePro is “trained people based and smart technology supported”.

Not to be a sales pitch, but whether it’s one room or a million square feet, TheMeasurePro system gives you an “as-built” blueprint drawing with great accuracy, and at the same time collect and store over 1,500 data points on the construction materials, floors, walls, windows, doors and serial numbers of all the appliances and home systems for less that 25% of what the others charge just for the measurements. NO software to buy and it’s all digital and can be in your inbox within minutes of our completion. No additional rendering and no waiting. We do a whole 2,500 sq. ft. home in about 2 hours and in commercial environments it’s up to about 100,000 sq. ft. a day.

If you would like to see one of our TMP Whole House or Whole Space Measure & SafetyChek Reports or talk to us about providing software or Measuring and Data Gathering services, either residential or commercial, for your company, just send me a note and watch us jump through your hoops! Let us help reduce your Windshield Time, improve your Efficiency and Drive Sales!

TheMeasurePro.com

Don Barrett, Chief Operating Officer

[email protected] 864-498-4260