Tech Companies Predict San Diego-Tijuana Border Zone Will Be New Silicon Valley Kate Kilpatrick - Al Jazeera
go to original August 11, 2014

3D Robotics is best known for its autopilot, a micro-controller that fits on drones and contains a GPS and satellite receiver as well as a gyroscope, accelerometer and other sensors. It works with free software developed by the open-source community. (Eros Hoagland/Al Jazeera America)

SAN DIEGO/TIJUANA — Six small gray plastic propellers whirred into action as flight test engineers Brad Golding, 34, and Grant Lieberman, 24, powered up the four-pound Y6 drone for a morning spin. The status lights blinked green, indicating the autopilot was initialized, and the three-armed vehicle lifted into the air and zipped off toward a pallet of shrink-wrapped supply boxes.

Outside the 3D Robotics office in San Diego the air was hot and still, with downtown Tijuana visible across the border with Mexico. It’s there — a 4-mile drone flight away (if the FAA allowed it) — where 3D Robotics has its manufacturing facility, and dozens of 20-something “associates” in blue lab coats, jeans and sneakers were busy printing circuit boards, testing autopilots and assembling 3D’s IRIS drone, sold online for $750.

Like a growing number of tech companies in the region, 3D Robotics is a binational startup happy to leverage its unique location along the U.S.-Mexico border. On the one side is orderly San Diego, which Forbes named the No. 1 place to launch a startup in 2014. On the other is chaotic Tijuana, which offers low-cost labor but also a growing number of talented engineers of its own. According to entrepreneurs on both sides, the “Cali-Baja Mega-Region” is poised to become its own Silicon Valley.

Read the rest at Al Jazeera

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