Will we ever have to look for anything again?
Thanks to new wireless networks, garbage bins can tell you when they’re full and parking spots when they’re empty
Think, for a moment, about the way the Tile could change city life as we know it. A ballyhooed indie product that drummed up $2.6 million in crowdsourced funding and is now about to hit the market, the Tile caters to people who have gotten used to finding a misplaced cellphone by calling the number and listening for the ring. If it works for phones, why not find other objects the same way?
A little white Bluetooth-enabled square that can be attached to any item—in a wallet, inside a guitar, stuffed inside a sock—the Tile will ring whenever someone uses a smartphone app to “call” it. You can use it to find a missing sock in your house, but you can also use it to locate the wallet you left on a streetcar—with the help of every other smartphone that has the Tile app installed. A whole city’s worth of phones could potentially be enlisted to cast a wireless net, looking for whatever you’ve lost.
May 5, 2014 Ivor Tossell
Canadian Business
