NEW YORK – China's SZ DJI Technology unveiled a small camera drone starting at $499 that can take off and land from the palm of a hand, seeking to appeal to the broader consumer market. The new Spark drone weighs about 300 grams, is equipped with a 1080-pixel video camera and can be controlled with a remote, a mobile device or using hand gestures alone, DJI said at an event in New York on Wednesday. The Shenzhen-based company will start shipping orders in mid-June. DJI is the world's leading maker of drones, but most of the gadgets in its existing lineup cost $1,000 or more and are used for surveying crops or industrial sites and in high-end filmmaking. The 11-year-old company is looking to expand its market to stay ahead as global revenue in the industry is projected to increase from more than $6 billion this year to $11.2 billion by 2020, according to researcher Gartner Inc. As the drone market becomes more mainstream, DJI is facing competition from cheaper rivals, especially in China, that have flooded the market with models from $10 mini toys to sub-$100 camera carriers.

Everyone loves taking selfies, even if they don't like to admit it. And if you're looking to take those snaps of yourself to the next level, DJI's new, cutesy Spark drone may be just for you. The company's latest drone is designed to fit on the palm of your hand and can be controlled with motion gestures, letting you take some over-the-top pictures and videos without much effort. You can wave your hand to have move it up or down, right or left and pull it toward or away from you, while a quick gesture that resembles you taking a picture will trigger the camera's selfie mode. The only drawback to this is that the Spark can only go up to 10 feet away from you, and that's where the Spark's companion app and remote control come in.

The new drone is the Spark from DJI. A link has been sent to your friend's email address. A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. The new drone is the Spark from DJI.

DJI Wednesday launched its new minicamera drone Spark, which weighs less than a can of soda -- and can be controlled by hand gestures. The small camera drone can take off from the palm of your hand and automatically goes on Gesture Mode, which features PalmControl, allowing you to control the gadget with hand movements. "Even if you've never flown a drone before, flying Spark is easy because the only remote controller you'll need is your hand," DJI said in a press release. With Gesture Mode, you can send the drone away from you, take a selfie or call it back by waving your hands. Spark can also be controlled by a remote controller and your smartphone.

The Donald Trump administration has asked Congress to give the federal government the ability to track and destroy any type of drone flying on domestic soil, a document obtained by the New York Times reveals. Under the proposal, government agencies and law enforcement would have the ability to monitor and take action against any unmanned aircraft system flying over an area designated for protection. The draft legislation would authorize government agencies to track, take control of and destroy any drone that it determines to be a threat to a "covered facility, location, or installation," which could refer to any number of locations. The proposal would call for the government to respect "privacy, civil rights and civil liberties" when exercising its power to take down drones, but courts would be given no jurisdiction to hear lawsuits filed by drone operators who have their vehicles downed. An exception for drones would be created through the proposal in U.S. hacking and surveillance laws and in Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) aircraft regulations, which currently protect the unmanned aircraft.

JD.com has made a major investment in this space beyond the work in Shaanxi. It is also building a 30-acre logistic and robotics research center in Xian, which will include HQ for JD Logistics, a cloud computing center, and a drone factory. After it establishes a working concept for large-scale drone delivery, JD.com wants to master inter-province drone aerial delivery, and then branch off to include global partnerships with international logistics providers.

When I worked at Popular Photography (RIP), part of my job was to review drones. I understood what made a drone desirable and what features were cool enough to notice, but I never got good at flying them. I crashed one into a picnic table and literally flew one off of a cliff, where it lost GPS contact and flew off over the wilds of upstate New York bound (I think?) for Canada. And while these unmanned crafts have come a long way since their humble and wobbly beginnings, they can still be a pain to set up and fly. The category leader DJI is hoping its new "palm-sized" drone called the Spark can change that.

Drone law is, like the wobbly uncrewed aircraft themselves, hardly settled law. On Friday, the District of Columbia circuit court of appeals overturned an existing rule from the FAA that mandated drone users register in a federal database in an attempt to enforce accountability. According to the decision, the rule did not have the legal standing to apply to anyone flying for hobby or recreational purposes, which is likely most of the over 800,000 people who registered. In the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012, Congress specified special rules for model airplanes, flown for hobby or recreational purposes, and charged the FAA with creating rules to govern the growing field of small unmanned aerial vehicles, specifically ones that fell outside this hobbyist/model airplane exception. In December 2015, the FAA announced that all owners of unmanned vehicles weighing more than 250 grams (or roughly as much as two sticks of butter) had to register as a drone operator, in a national database of drone users.

Drone company DJI launched a $499 mini camera drone that lifts off from the palm of the hand. It captures and shares photos on the go, and can be controlled by hand gestures alone. It allows users to send the drone up and away, take a selfie and be called with a hand gesture – and weighs less than a can of soda. The drone, called Spark, weighs just 10.6 ounces (300 grams) and can be operated by a remote controller, a mobile device, or via hand gestures. The drone will be sold in five different colors: White, blue, green, red and yellow.

The slow-moving, unidentified object flying over South Korea's border on Tuesday afternoon caused so much concern that soldiers issued loudspeaker warnings and ultimately fired more than 90 machine gun rounds in the air. What first seemed like a provocative North Korean military incursion -- perhaps a drone flight over the two countries' highly secured border -- turned out to be much more innocuous, the South Korean military said Wednesday. After studying radar evidence and thermal imagery, those military officials now believe the incident was sparked by a group of large North Korean balloons -- likely an effort to drop propaganda leaflets on the rogue state's ideological adversaries in the South. Though less serious than first reported, the incident underscores the heightened tensions along the border, and the region generally. That's because of the North's continued advancement as a nuclear state and its increasing technical prowess in developing missiles that can deliver warheads.