Cheap flying sensors

At the 2010 CES show in January, one of the more interesting products unveiled was the AR Drone by Parrot Systems http://ardrone.parrot.com/parrot-ar-drone/en  The drone is basically a hard foam aircraft with two micro video cameras attached to it.  It can be controlled via an app on the iPhone and sends live video feeds back to the phone.  This is not only very cool, it stretched the limit of how we think about 4G, digital swarms, and connected objects as I discuss in my book, The New World of Wireless: How to Compete in the 4G Revolution on Wharton Publishing (http://www.whartonsp.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=013700379X) There are three potential impacts that are worth discussing: 1) having live video feeds overhead present enormous opportunities for surveillance and privacy issues; 2) free flying video could provide tremendous opportunities for efficient and safe building/plant inspections, cheap remote sensing, and even coverage of community events/sports; 3) the possibility of having relay nodes in the sky to quickly move data across mesh networks versus backhauling through currently overloaded cell networks.  Not to mention the huge load of millions of video feeds being dumped onto wireless networks.  Routing these to the most optimal broadband access point may be useful and even necessary in teh future.  It will all depend if everyone needs to have their own private spyplane!