Tropes

impactlab_2014 00242.txt

#Tile creates the world s largest lost and found Tile makes sure you never lose anything ever again. Wouldn it be great if you never lost anything you cared about ever again: your keys, your wallet, your favorite leather jacket? You could even tap into a large group of strangers to help you track down a stolen bike. After months of hype, a company called Tile has started this week shipping a device that can help you do just that. Just attach the $25 device to an object, and your smartphone will find it for you, up to a range of 50 to 150 feet. It not the first such gadget. But what makes this one different is that it also a social network of sorts. If your lost jacket isn in some mysterious corner of your home you can ask all other Tile App users to watch for it. If they get near it, their phones will beep and they can alert you to the jacket whereabouts. That why its creators, Mike Farley and Nick Evans, call it he world largest lost and found. In 2013, Tile made news for being the most successful campaign to use open source crowdfunding software elfstarter, on its own website to raise funds. It blew by its $20, 000 goal in minutes, and raised $2. 6 million from close to 50,000 backers. After the funding campaign closed pre-orders still rolled in. By the end of the year, the company sold more than 450,000 tiles to 125,000 people, it said. Tile got even more attention when Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak ordered some of the devices. Woz was invited to visit the company and he even posed for a photo, which went viral on the et. In late 2013, Evans appeared on the CNBC reality show he Power Pitchwhere startups convince VCS to invest. Panelists Byron Deeter, of Bessemer Venture Partners, and David Wu, of Maveron, both did undisclosed, for an amount. And interest in the gadget still hasn wavered. A few days ago Ross Mason, founder of hot enterprise startup Mulesoft (which raised $130 million in venture investment) tweeted about Tile. Mason tells us he dabbles in some Angel investing, specifically nternet of Things (Iot) startups, companies making internet-controlled objects t

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