Crowdsourcing to find things
Tile and Trackr, like Coin and Plastc, I think, are good examples of products that are new, use parallax scrolling websites, seek to change the way we interact with the world around us, and that get their name by vowels from everyday words. Tile and Trackr are two of a group of companies that look to use crowdsourcing techniques to help people find things. The general idea is this: you get a small tchotchke from Tile (incidentally, Tile’s says Tile on it, and is also named Tile) or Trackr. The object is about the size of a name tag, was engineered to be as unobtrusive as possible, and is meant to be attached or otherwise kept in some way on or in an item that you will probably lose (for example, you might attach it to your dog’s collar, or stick it in your wallet). And say you lose this thing, just as you thought you might. Tile promises to help you find it via a convenient app on your smartphone. How?
Each Tile or Trackr emits a signal. Your phone picks up this signal and displays for you the relevant information about the whereabouts of your item in a meticulously-designed GUI. All of this generally applies to all the similar devices in this category. The interesting thing about Trackr’s device is that it makes use of something it calls Crowd GPS, which means that when you lose something, not only is your device looking for that something, so is every device in the area. I imagine that it works in a similar way to the devices that one might buy in order to augment a Wi-fi signal so that even in the darkest corners of your house, you can still enjoy a high-definition Netflix experience; if your device is too far away from your wallet or dog or whatever, another device in Trackr’s network will pick up the slack and carry the signal to your phone. In the context of this class, this is a network of people, a network of devices, and it seems to work in a similar way to a Wi-fi network.
A while back, I remember seeing that one of these companies was giving their devices away for free. The motivation for this is that a network-driven product like Trackr gets a lot of its value from the size of the network. If you’re the only person in the world with a Trackr and your dog has run out of your range, then Trackr might not work so well. On the other hand, if someone were halfway between where you are and where your dog is, that person’s phone could carry the signal from your dog’s Trackr to you. It’s a really cool idea, and one that I think uses the power of networks really well.
https://www.thetileapp.com/
http://www.thetrackr.com/