At CES, there were a couple of "selfie drones." The Nixie is designed to be worn on your wrist, taken off, thrown, and then it returns to you after taking a photo or video. There was also the Zano which is fancier and claims it will follow you around, tracking you as you mountain bike or ski to make a video of you just as you do your cool trick.

The selfie is everywhere. In Rome, literally hundreds of vendors tried to sell me selfie sticks in all the major tourist areas, even with a fat Canon DSLR hanging from my neck. It's become the most common street vendor gadget. (The blue LED wind up helicopters were driving me nuts anyway.)

I also had been thinking about this, and came up with a design that's not as capable as these designs, but might be better. My selfie drone would be tethered. You would put down the base which would have the batteries and a retractable cord. Up would fly the camera drone, which would track your phone to get a great shot of you. (If it were for me, it would also offer panorama mode where it spun around at the top shooting a pano, with you or without you.)

This drone could not follow you as you do a sport, of course, or get above a certain height. But unlike the free designs, it would not get lost over the cliff in the winds, as I think might happen to a number of these free selfie drones. It turns out that cliffs and outlook points are a common place to want to take these photos, they are the place you really need a high view to capture you and what's below you.

Secondly, with the battery on the ground, and only a short tether wire needed, you can have a much better camera as payload. Only needing a short flight time and not needing to carry the batteries means more capabilities for the drone.

It's also less dangerous, and is unlikely to come under regulation because it physically can't fly beyond a certain altitude or distance from the base. It could not shoot you from water or from over the edge of the cliff as the other drones could if you were willing to risk them.

My variation would probably be a niche. Most selfies are there to show off where you were, not to be top quality photos. Only more serious photographers would want one capable of hauling up a quality lens. Because mine probably wants a motor in the base to reel it back in (so you don't have to wind the cables) it might even cost more, not less.

The pano mode would be very useful. In so many pano spots, the view is fantastic but is blocked by bushes and trees, and the spectacular pano shot is only available if you go up enough. For daytime a tethered drone would probably do fine. I'm still waiting on the Panono -- a ball, studded with cameras from Berlin that was funded by Kickstarter. You throw the ball up, and it figures when it is at the top of its flight and shoots the panorama all at once. Something like that could also be carried by a tethered drone, and it has the advantage of not moving between shots as a spinning drone would be at risk for. This is another thing I've wanted for a while. After my first experiments in airplane and helicopter based panoramas showed you really want to shoot everything all at once, I imagined having decent digital cameras getting cheap enough to buy 16 of them and put them in a circle. Sadly, once cameras starting doing that, there were always better cameras that I now decided I needed that were too expensive to buy for that purpose.