CrowdGPS

The first is TrackR. This Santa Barbara based company doesn't really make the product I'm looking for. It makes a nice solution for those who lose car keys, wallets, purses. Its device is so small it's unobtrusive. It can go on a keychain or attach to your dog's collar (dangling alongside his county license). Your lost item is detectable when it's within the BLE distance of a device carrying the TrackR app. Usually you misplace your car keys within the vicinity of your smart phone, so, no worries, your phone will locate your keys. (Just don't lose your phone.)

But it's better than that. The TrackR app finds your lost item when it's detectible by any device that's got the TrackR app installed. So, if you get home, find you don't have your wallet, and then ping your dog-tag-sized device, if that device in your wallet is within the BLE range of any device with the TrackR app installed (i.e., another smart phone), your wallet is discoverable. How is the location of your device determined? By CrowdGPS, that is, your search queries all the devices in the TrackR network, and when a device locates your lost item that device's GPS tells you pretty closely where your lost item is.

What you see when you search for your item is the last place the TrackR app saw your device, that is, maybe in the restaurant where you left it last night if one of the servers or customers had the TrackR app installed. TrackR has the technology to offer more than this. It can give you a history. A trail. This would be important for tracking a stolen item, because if your bike is spotted by the TrackR app 6 times over the last several days, and 3 are the same location, pretty good chance your item is there.

What if the dirtbag who stole your bike does not have the TrackR device on his cell phone, and your bike is in his house until he sells it on eBay? This is a problem.

One solution is to make sure the TrackR app is ubiquitous. Could the TrackR app be payload on a program almost everybody has? An internet browser. A mobile device's operating system. It will be interesting to see what TrackR does to speed up the deployment of its app. Some of this depends on whether TrackR sees itself as fulfilling the role of a LoJack, or if it's comfortable acting simply as a way for you to find your misplaced keys.

You might reply that this technology on a ubiquitious app exists. iBeacon and Eddystone are similar to TrackR, and Apple and Google do have ubiquitous placement on handheld devices. But these technologies don't work like TrackR, at least not yet. They don't crowdsource a search. They're simply ways for you to find the automotive section in Target, or your seat in a stadium. This isn't to say they couldn't compete with TrackR, they just don't.

There are devices right now, which you can buy, that you can attach discretely to your bike, that will work. Just, as with TrackR, the question is whether the network is build out sufficiently so that your stolen bike will be located. It's got to be within range of of a LoRa or SIGFOX receiver. There is one company making devices with circuitry that can be located by both networks, but this is rare.

The beauty of these networks is that you need fewer base stations to complete a network than is the case with cellular. And, communication is over a sub-GHz unregulated frequency band. SIGFOX has France fairly well connected. The image below is a screenshot of SIGFOX'S deployment map. The network is fast getting deployed in many European countries. It promises to have 10 major U.S. metropolitan areas wired by April of 2016 (San Francisco, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, Austin, Houston, Atlanta, Dallas, San Jose).