Tile taps the cloud to help keep tabs on your personal belongings
US startup talks crowdfunding, Low Energy Bluetooth, Android and privacy issues around tracking your belongings!
Tile's product is a Bluetooth Low Energy-toting tile that attaches to personal possessions
The obvious question to ask new technology startups is what problem they're solving. Tile has a clear answer to that: it wants to help people stop losing their keys, wallets, handbags and other possessions.
It's far from the first company with that ambition. "There've been a lot of these devices on the market for many years," says Tile's co-founder and chief operating officer Mike Farley.
"People just weren't using them. But with so many attempts, you know there's a big market for it. And when Bluetooth Low Energy came out for the iPhone, it got us thinking that technology might have finally caught up to the problem."
Tile's product is a combination of software and hardware. The latter are small, tile-shaped Bluetooth tags designed to stick onto devices, hang from keyrings or sit within a bag or purse.
The software is an iOS app for people to manage up to 10 of the tiles, tracking their location if they're within Bluetooth range, and sending out an alert if they're further afield, to see if they're within range of anyone else running the Tile app.
This distributed network is one of the key features for Tile: other people can't see the location of your tiles unless you explicitly allow them to, but if they have the app running in the background and your tile is nearby, you'll be able to see where it is.
"That's the game-changing technology: the fact that it's not just you, your device and your tiles," says Farley. "It's about the way it's attached to an account in the cloud, and everyone else is connected."
Farley and his co-founder Nick Evans quit their previous jobs in November 2012 after producing the first prototypes for Tile, then launched a crowdfunding campaign through their own website in June 2013, hoping to raise $20,000 in pre-orders.
One month later, 49,586 people had pre-ordered nearly $2.7m worth of the tiles, which start at $18.95 for one, rising to $170.55 for 12. Shipping is expected to start late this year or early in 2014.
Farley says that Evans' previous experience working on smart-watch Pebble and keyless lock Lockitron – the former crowdfunded on Kickstarter, and the latter through its own site – made crowdfunding a logical choice for Tile too.
"It was always on the roadmap right from the super-early prototypes," he says. "And we knew if we did a selfstarter, we would be in control: we could get all our ducks in a row, stick to our schedule and not have any more hiccups than we already know we'll probably have."
Tile's business model is based on replacement hardware. The tiles are designed to last for a year, with customers sent a reminder when that date is approaching to order new ones, and sent an envelope to recycle the old ones.
Farley says ease-of-use is one reason for this approach: no need to buy new coin cell batteries and manually replace the existing one, although I suspect a fair few people will be experimenting to see how easy this is nonetheless.
"We thought long and hard about it, and we were very convinced that one year is the right amount of time," says Farley, who says the recycling aspect is also an important part of the company's plans.
"Whenever I have old batteries sitting on a counter, I think 'I'm going to dispose of that properly', and they just start to build up," he says.
"That's another hassle, another problem that you're giving the users. In general, the best computer services from start to finish make your life easier. Maybe you have to pay a little bit more, but it's not giving you extra problems."
The annual replacement cycle should go hand-in-hand with improvements to the actual tiles: Farley mentions a continual drive to get them slimmer, as well as bringing the price down.
"As Bluetooth Low Energy comes down in price and more hardware manufacturers develop more of these chips, they're going to get cheaper, and as more devices get built, a lot of the components around it get cheaper," he says.
"We want to keep the quality up, but get the cost down so we can hit more markets. We want this to be everywhere: not just in the United States and developed countries."
One flaw in the distributed network of Tile users is the fact that its app is iOS-only. Once tiles stray out of their owner's Bluetooth range, the network is only as useful as the number of people in it. For now, hundreds of millions of Android devices are shut out of that network.
Are Tile just Cupertino-blinkered Apple fanboys blind to the realities of smartphone market-share? Actually, the company says the lack of Android support is down to technical issues around Bluetooth Low Energy technology.
"At this time Android does not support Bluetooth 4.0. A few Android phone manufacturers have released BLE SDKs, however they are lacking in quality and stability," explains the Tile website, which adds that "solid Bluetooth 4.0 support on Android" will be the trigger to "start making plans" to port the Tile app to Android.
"We thought long and hard again, and did our research on Android, but it comes back to providing the best user experience," says Farley.
"We want to deliver on that strong, whatever platform we're on. We know that we can deliver it on iOS but Android is just… it's not really there. So we're going to concentrate on creating a rock-solid iOS app, and once the time is right we will go ahead and build an app for other platforms."
Farley also praises Apple for some of the new features in its upcoming iOS 7 software to make Bluetooth Low Energy "more usable and richer from an app development standpoint", including the under-the-radar (to non-developers) iBeacons location feature.
Another obvious question for Tile concerns privacy, including the 'can someone hack this to be able to track all the things I've attached tiles to?' question – unanswerable until the product ships – but also the possibility of people using tiles to track not their own belongings, but other people.
"It's one of those unfortunate realities of any technology, right? They can almost always be used for harm as well. But the exact same thing can be done with a normal phone," says Farley.
"You can throw a phone in someone's purse and try to keep track of them, or buy a GPS tracker. But we do have some ideas that we're brainstorming on how to potentially pinpoint these types of situations."
Unsurprisingly, he can't say more for now. My last question is a more philosophical one, though, relating to an alternative method of not losing important personal objects: remembering where you put them down in the first place.
Is there a concern about the way Tile delegates this task to our devices (and the cloud), removing responsibility for us to take care of our belongings? You could ask similar questions about Gmail, Evernote and other cloud services, of course.
Farley fields the question with grace. "In a lot of ways it does make us a little bit less responsible, but then I think about how I remember things by writing them down rather than just remembering them. Writing lists puts my brain at rest, and I'm able to think about the important things," he says.
"And I consider Tile the same type of thing. You can only think about so many things at once, and remembering where your phone, your son's teddy bear, your Reebok sneaker is? That's not really productive for society. It's much easier to let a technology take care of that, freeing you up to think about the things that really matter."
Source: The Guardian
No comments:
Post a Comment