Nearables: Why a global lost-and-found network is finally viable

The estimote stickers are pretty cool. However, I notice they have a battery life of one year, at $12.50 a sticker ($99 for a pack of 10 + $25 in shipping) it is starting to get close to where I can imagine buying a set. If only they had some sort of solar recharging, or ability to pop in a new battery for a few bucks.

Thanks for the thorough description. Could we simplify this by replacing the beacons with a sticker that says "if found email DS7-4BD-62A@lostfound.org" and the rest of the flow begin through email? Much lower barriers with almost all of the same results.

I'm still waiting for the energy-harvesting, no-battery-required, versions to hit the market .. seems the technology (BTLE) is out there, but its just waiting for someone to have the balls to mass-manufacture them ..

For the iphone at least the problem is apple will not approve apps that try to discover beacons. Identifiers must be baked into the application, which greatly limits their utility.

It's been viable for at least a year in other forms. (Have a small demo system) However, there are some technical and social challenges associated with such a database. Most notably it would be very easy to poison the well as a thief/opportunitist. There's zero security around what beacons represent themselves as, it takes less than a second to clone one with a smartphone app.

I&#x27;d like a passport holder that sets off an alarm on my phone eveytime its more than 2 meters away. You&#x27;d only have it active when you are travelling. Might help relieve some of the paranoia I have about loosing it.<p>I Say passport holder because I&#x27;m not sure if you could physically affix if to the passport without upsetting border control.

Isn&#x27;t this basically Tile? <a href="https://www.thetileapp.com/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thetileapp.com&#x2F;</a>

Cory Doctorow&#x27;s <i>Makers</i> describes a very similar item tracking and locating system based off of RFID. With effective reader ranges being up to several meters, this could be extended to a L&amp;F system.

For that matter, the app could just record every time it &quot;sees&quot; an object and when you mark it lost, it tells you where it was the last time (GPS coordinates and all) it &quot;saw&quot; it.

I sat in a coffee shop ~5 years ago, and sketched out what a lost-and-found system based on QR codes and QR code readers. My particular application was &#x27;Non-verbal kid lost at mall, kindly smartphone user with QR reader scans (branded) QR code on kid&#x27;s shirt to get parent&#x27;s contact info&#x27;, but I saw no reason why that couldn&#x27;t work for any item large enough to have a QR code painted&#x2F;sprayed&#x2F;stapled on. I don&#x27;t know why this doesn&#x27;t exist yet.