People lose stuff. It is a fact of modern society. Smartphones, tablets, hats, mittens… children. What if you could tag all the stuff you lose most often with a little tracker and get a ping on your smartphone if it gets too far away from you? Then here comes the Linquet Mini: a small dongle that you can tag on any item you might lose and connect it to your smartphone with Bluetooth.
About the size of a quarter, the Linquet Mini can be tagged to basically anything. It keeps tabs of items through a free app that uploads information to the cloud. Consumers can link multiple items to the app and set different items to a variety of profiles. For instance, if you want to link your dog, you could tag its collar with a Linquet Mini and set the range for “far.” If you are walking down the streets of Manhattan with your child, you might want to tag the kid as “near.” Each profile can be adjusted with different notification sounds. If you press a button from the app, the Linquet will make a sound to help you find what you are looking for.
The whereabouts of your items are uploaded to the cloud from the dongle. Linquet sells the cloud service for $29.99 a year while the dongle itself is free. The company calls this pricing model “hardware as a service.” The Linquet Mini is currently in a crowd-funding period with the goal of raising $75,000 to be able to ship the Minis by May 2013.
Of course, Linquet is not the only company to provide tracking service. LoJack is perhaps the original popular commercial tracking device, tracking lost and stolen vehicles since 1986. The company’s name has become synonymous with placing a tracking device on an item. LoJack also now makes laptop tracking software and hardware. A variety of software apps exist to find lost smartphones and tablets, such as Lookout’s Android and iOS apps or Apple’s “Find My iPhone” feature through iCloud.
For readers that want to reserve a Linquet Mini and a year of cloud service, visit the company’s website and use the code “linqrw” to reserve a dongle for $25.
Lead image courtesy Shutterstock.
