What problem are they solving? asks the Guardian.
“Tile has a clear answer to that: it wants to help people stop losing their keys, wallets, handbags and other possessions.”
Wired says, “Tile Might Be a Revolutionary Gizmo For Finding Lost Keys and Stolen Purses.”
“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.”
Tile’s product is a combination of software and hardware. The small, tile-shaped Bluetooth tags are designed to stick onto devices, hang from keyrings or sit in 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.
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