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| Angelika/Mike Schilli |
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Michael Some people in our household, and I'm not naming names here on purpose, are constantly misplacing their keys and wallet. You'd think that's an easy to solve problem, simply make it a habit to always put them in the same place, but with progressing age, it gets harder and harder to change bad habits.
But there's help for people who are constantly searching for misplaced items. The startup company Tile, located in Silicon Valley (where else), produces slender white plastic squares to attach to your key ring or stick inside your wallet. They can't determine their GPS position on their own, but are in constant contact with their owner's cell phone unless it moves away more than 30 feet. If the Tile app on the smart phone notices that the tile goes out of range, it stores its latest known position. Now if you misplace an item with an attached tile, simply pull out your smart phone, open the app and see the last known position of your item on a map. If it's within Bluetooth range of the phone, the app can contact the tile and make it play a ringtone, so that it can be located even if it's out of sight, like in between the sofa cushions. And since the smart phone app is constantly updating the Tile servers with its current GPS position, other cell phones on the same account can be included as well and get a copy of the location data.
The tiles cost about $17 each and last about a year. As the embedded battery can't be replaced, new tiles need to be purchased if they run out of juice, that's how the company makes money.
If an item with an attached tile is hopelessly out of reach, for example because a wallet has been stolen, it can be registered as lost with the Tile app. The Tile server then broadcasts the missing tile message to the Tile apps of other users, which then internally report if they come across the missing tile by accident. If this happens, the original user gets a report on where the missing Tile has been located, that's hilarious!
And the Tile app has another interesting side effect: In our household, for example, we have a total of four Tiles in use, and they're being monitored by two different smartphones. Since the tiles are usually close to their owners, you get a pretty good idea on where they're located at any point in time. For me, this means that I can find out almost instantly where Angelika is milling around at the moment, because her smartphone reports its position to the Tile server, which updates my smartphone with her position. That's quite handy, I've got to say, but if you don't want to be tracked, simply turn off your phone's GPS function.
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