ABOUT THIS ENTRY
The Drone Racing League (DRL), the world’s premier, professional drone racing property, and Google Cloud partnered to reimagine a new era of tech-driven sports, win over the developers of tomorrow, and inspire dreamers, builders, and innovators everywhere to race drones using Google Cloud technology.
How does this represent “Excellence in Engagement”?
Google can team up with any league they want to—they’re Google. The Google Cloud team already had several sports partnerships, including with NBA’s Golden State Warriors, MLB’s Statcast, and Fox Sports, but the opportunity to engage DRL fans enabled Google Cloud to transcend sports, innovate through groundbreaking technology, demonstrate real use cases for the Google Cloud Platform, and create a new customer pool.
Moving forward, DRL and Google Cloud’s engineering teams plan to co-innovate other DRL sports experiences together to take the DRL fan experience to the next level while increasing the customer base for Google Cloud.
Objective
In September 2022, the Drone Racing League (DRL), the world’s premier, professional drone racing property, announced a partnership with Google Cloud to reimagine a new era of tech-driven sports, win over the developers of tomorrow, and inspire dreamers, builders, and innovators everywhere to race drones using Google Cloud technology.
Both globally recognized for technology innovation, progressive thinking, and making the future happen today, DRL and Google Cloud set out to create tech-driven programming to engage their worldwide community of developers through the sport of drone racing and light up a new audience of prospective Google Cloud customers.
Merging drone racing with Google Cloud through a physical drone race and virtual tech challenge, the partners looked to enable DRL’s young, global "tech-setter" fans – who are more likely to be software developers, engineers, or work in key Information Technology positions than the general population - to boost their cloud skills and get a first-hand experience of Google’s advanced artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data analytics capabilities.
Strategy & Execution
DRL and Google Cloud launched DRL’s 2022–23 Season with the Race in the Cloud Presented by Google Cloud in Silicon Valley, where thousands of fans watched the world's best drone pilots race high-speed drones through an immersive aerial course.
Strategically timed to Google Cloud’s marquee tech event, the race was held on the opening night of Google Cloud Next, the annual conference where big thinking and technology converge to solve the challenges of tomorrow.
Attendees at Next '22 also had the opportunity to participate in the Google Cloud Fly Cup Challenge, a competition for developers to boost cloud skills and drive innovation in the sport of drone racing using Google's secure, reliable, and scalable cloud platform. The Challenge invited developers to predict drone racing results using DRL data and help make DRL more competitive through a series of three stages that became progressively more complex while intensifying participants’ cloud-skills.
Developers analyzed DRL race data, including race times, number of crashes, and flight path, while leveraging Google Analytics tools to help give DRL pilots a rich and deeper understanding of how they can optimize their flight and improve their performance during future competitions.
Organizations
- Drone Racing League
Credits
Nicholas Horbaczewski
CEO & Founder
Drone Racing League
Rachel Jacobson
President
Drone Racing League
Ari Mark
SVP, Head of Partnership Development
Drone Racing League
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