Tiles Will Soon Be All Over Everything
Wired’s article about the new Tile key tags raises some interesting possibilities for the technology – and leaves others to the imagination. The primary use case is simply to find lost keys. The user attaches a Tile chip to her key chain and then uses a smartphone app to track it down when it goes missing. In fact, you can use any body’s smartphone, you just need the app loaded.
And that leads to a grander vision in which you can find your things (those attached to a Tile) anywhere in the world so long as they’re in range of a smartphone with the app. Obviously you’d need pretty widespread adoption for that to be useful. But market penetration hurdles aside, a thief could simply remove and toss away the tile; but suppose manufacturers built them into valuable consumer items like cameras and bicycles. Not only would they be able to provide customers with anti-theft technology for negligible added cost, they would then be able to combine the tracking information with other location data and learn about how purchasers use their device, delivering enormously comprehensive and precise market research. Indeed, were smartphone makers among the first (the location accuracy is much better than GPS can offer especially indoors), motivating them to pre-load the app, the critical mass of adopters would be there overnight.
To know real time where and how your product is being used would be invaluable. Consumers may find this scrutiny discomfiting, and manufacturers might shy away from such ideas at the moment; however the trend seems to be towards greater tolerance of this kind of intrusion. It’s like income tax: if you can get them to say yes once, it will be too useful to ever dispense with later.
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