Last month we shared a video demo of BluetagMe, the product our startup has been quietly working on for the better part of a year. The response has been incredible. The design community is excited and offering ideas, asking to participate and offering to advise. Clearly many people want a tag to protect their valuables and we welcome everyone's input.

We can't wait to put BluetagMe in the hands of everyone who wants to use it in the coming months. But we need to be careful about how we do that because this is tag design and experience has to be incredible. BluetagMe depends on amazing Bluetooth low-energy and other mobile-connected technologies. While we've designed our service to handle lots of users, we want to be careful not to add everyone at the same time.

In order to ensure that people using our Tag have a reliable and lightning-fast experience, we're going to follow the path of services like Gmail, Pinterest, and Spotify and use reservations to control the initial distribution of new tag accounts. We've decided that the best way to do this is with as much transparency as possible, so our system is really simple: reserve your BluetagMe service tag today if you haven't already, and once the app is in the Android and App Store, tags designed and prototyped with 3D-printing, we will begin filling reservations on a first-come, first-served basis. If you haven't reserved your BluetagMe yet, you can sign up now.

We're doing everything we can to bring BluetagMe to everyone who wants one, but we're going to need your help to make this work. We're a small startup, and transforming the "lost & found" to the Internet of Things and mobile age is a big, big challenge. Along with your feedback and excitement, we ask for your understanding and patience. Make sure you've reserved your BluetageMe, and encourage friends and colleagues who you think might like their own tags to reserve their spots in line, too. In the meantime, we'll work as hard and as fast as we can to get BluetagMe out into the world as soon as possible.


The BluetagMe Team

After several false starts and failures suddenly, we saw a startup that makes thermostats worth $800 Million. The company called Nest Labs launched a product the tech world could not stop talking about. But the product isn't something that normally gets people excited. Now a year later, the startup that makes thermostats is worth $800 million. This showed us how good design—from one the designer team leaders at Apple—can help create disruption and innovation that gets consumers to want and buy. We're hoping to build the design team that follows this path.

Then, we found a great digital agency and consultancy in Pittsburgh, PA named Brunner (www.brunnerworks.com) and their BHiveLab innovation lab that represented a think tank collaboration of creative technologists dedicated to finding innovative ways to engage on-the-go consumers. We met and designed market research and feedback from pet owners (our first use case for BluetagMe).

Brunner helped us re-imagine a cloud-connected tag that's clever, and fun and social. Market research demonstrated strong purchase intent, particularly for a pet ID collar based tag solution. However, consumer focus group, surveys and collective opinions did not like subsequent prototyped designs.

What was lacking was compelling and attractive design of the newly envisioned tag product that would be attractive and functional. In addition, initial product design(s) were NFC/RFID only and lacked the important breakthrough addition of Bluetooth® Low Energy ID technology because that was not commercially available at time of consumer research. Bluetooth, combined with our basic NFC/RFID design represents a great new design option and product opportunity to not only protect pets, but many other valuables from keys and luggage to laptop bags and cases.

As an entrepreneur, the Founder has worked for ten years (yes that's not a typo) and never gave up. Many false starts but now the integration of new, miniaturized, and proven mobile smart phone technologies and apps integrating NFC and the latest Bluetooth Low-Energy capabilities, offer a new product design and launch opportunity taking full advantage of the commitment and years of research and development already undertaken.

Now, we're stoked with the new transponder technology and success of NEST ready to take the very best experiences from the mobile app word and mobile technologies we use everyday and applying them to this archaic process of finding and protecting our stuff from disappearing.

Let's face it we all misplace or lose things. The keys, the laptop bag, even our beloved pets, but that doesn't mean locating and finding them can't be just as easy as losing it. With BluetagMe the inconvenience and frustration from losing important stuff—from your pet to car keys—can truly become a thing of the past.