We've all been there before. Dressed up, ready to go, shoes tied and just barely on schedule to make it out of the house on time, before you discover that your keys aren't in your pocket. It's a maddening scenario, but one that a new start-up, Tile, is hoping to make sure never happens to you again.
"There've been a lot of these devices on the market for many years," co-founder and COO Mike Farley is quoted as saying by the Guardian. "People just weren't using them. But with so many attempts, you know there's a big market for it."
Tile is a small, square-shaped chip that can be attached to any of your valuable items, such as your wallet or purse. Once attached, the chips and your items can be located using a mobile app. The central idea isn't new, but it's one that Farley says is possible now more than ever.
"When Bluetooth Low Energy came out for the iPhone, it got us thinking that technology might have finally caught up to the problem."
Tile sparked a bit of news last month when it kicked off a SelfStarter campaign in an effort to accumulate crowdfunding. Now that reports are coming out of the campaign having resulted in $2.6 million in funding, Tile looks fully set to launch its service to iOS products.
"We’ve created a super, super inexpensive device that doesn’t need recharging, that gives GPS-like functionality," co-founder Nick Evas told Tech Crunch.
Inexpensive, in this context, may be highly subjective for the product that will cost $18.95 per chip and will last a year, but it's a price that Farley says is simply a starting point that is bound to go 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," the COO said.
