Show HN: IsThisLost helps you recover lost items like keys and phones | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: IsThisLost helps you recover lost items like keys and phones

isthislost.com

51 pointsisthislost42 comments

As someone who is constantly losing things, I love seeing a business in this space. A couple things holding I don't like:

1) Your stickers don't seem very visible. Faded green and white? Put some neon orange on there or something.

2) I don't know what happens when someone puts in a code? I tried with some of the codes I saw in your slider but I got an invalid tag error. Maybe I put the wrong code in.

Here's what I would love: I give you $10-20, you send me a bunch of stickers/key tags/cards etc with my picture, email, and phone number on it. I don't think a middle man is that much of a value add. Especially since I don't know who you are, and have no reason to believe you will still be in business in 2 months.

This might interest you too: http://www.asylum.com/2009/07/13/baby-pictures-are-key-to-ha...

I would recommend against adding any personally identifiable information to things like your house keys as you wouldn't want anyone finding your keys be able to figure out your house address.

Umm, nice. As you can tell, I am from the IsThisLost.com team. The stickers come in blue and green now. We'll introduce other colors and laser engraving service in a couple of months.

We talk to many of our customers, and people get it. They realize that a company going out of business is a smaller risk than losing stuff without any identification on it.

But this is not a unique idea. I've already seen several companies doing the _exact_ same thing. What does IsThisLost bring to the table? And what reason do we have to assume you're going to fare better than any of those other companies?

Yes, I agree that there are many companies out there. The key to success, in our minds, is to do it better than anyone else. To that end, we 1) have better name, 2) anonymizing service, 3) anonymous post back, 4) managed recovery, i.e. a service agent steps in, if needed and arranges for the return postage.

What about economics? How many months of service would it cost me to replace my most valued possession? For that matter, we're talking some percentage of that amount since you can't guarantee I'll get anything back at all.

For the money, I think I would rather just insure anything of value I can't afford to replace and be careful about misplacing other things.

Alex, I am from the IsThisLost team. We hear you. The way we figured the economics is that according to a recent survey (see http://mozy.com/reports/lost-and-found/data-loss-cost/), a person is likely to irretrievably lose about $95 worth of stuff a year. With our observed 75% retrieval rate, you are getting about $70 value for $20 cost.

Would insurance cover the intangible value, e.g. pictures and docs that were not backed up, or an item of sentimental value. Also, have you factored the deductible?

I hear your argument well and will think about addressing those concerns. At the very least, I'll urge you to print your own tags and apply them to your belongings. Doesn't hurt, does it?

> Can you recover your lost keys or phone without sharing your personal info with a stranger?

I was thinking about this the other day when I temporarily lost my key, and figured that you could attach a non-personal email address in the keychain. Or maybe a phone number if there's a service that routes calls through an unidentifiable number.

That's IsThisLost.

Reminds of a serie of experiments in psychology and their conclusions:

- Putting a photo of a child or a baby in one's wallet raises the return rate ;

- putting a brief of paper with the words 'if you find this, bring it back to XXX, money award is in the other pocket' while actually not adding the money award works too.

That's all I remember for now.

Off topic: if French is your native language, you'll try to use the word "serie" in English because it looks like "série" - but we don't actually have that word in modern English, we say "a series". I don't know why.

Ah, thanks for the correction! It makes sense in some way.

(And I confirm my first language is French.)

I tested this with child art on the key tags and the tags were recognized well before the present tags are. I guess the next step is to get people to upload their own art and design their own tag. Like it.

These comments are a treasure trove of great feedback for us (I am from IsThisLost team). Thank you so much, everyone.

Please write to us at let-me-try-it@isthislost.com, and we'll be happy to send anyone a free basic subscription to IsThisLost.

I don't understand how this is better than just writing your email address on the item and have them contact you directly?!

From the FAQ: Do I get something in return? We offer all our finders a free 1-year subscription and a starter kit of tags to protect their property. No payment is needed. On top of this, five grand prizes are awarded each December to five finders. Prizes include $250 gift cards to iTunes, Amazon, and Macy's and a lifetime subscription to IsThisLost.

I find this fun and good-spirited :)

I am not sure about the monthly fee though, I'd rather get a set of nice sticker and keycard. I understand the middle-man/passive income thingy but it's a little bit hard to sell. On the other hand, 2$ isn't a lot and nothing bad should happen if the venture disappears.

If I looked this up after finding someone's keys, I have to admit that I would be somewhat annoyed at them trying to acquire me as a customer and pretend like they are giving me a gift. I think it would be much better to offer a flat $25 reward to anyone who is willing to return the lost keys. Since people lose their keys only extremely rarely, I find it hard to believe this would "break the bank."

Totally agree. We'll look into changing that policy. Is there a potential for abuse here?

Email addresses can be traced back to you by the evil doers, I imagine.

Interesting, but there are a couple of things that this doesn't really cover:

1) Your about page is empty. I can find a mailing address on your contact page, but that's it.

2) What happens if you lose something overseas? How do you coordinate returns in that case? This would be a key sticking point for me.

1. Thank you for the feedback. We will check on the About page shortly.

2. If you are on location and do receive email, you'd be notified and you can arrange with the finder to get your keys back.

If you have left the location, our customer service agent would take over and arrange to have the keys (or phone) shipped back your registered address, at no charge to you.

Neat idea. Keep in mind that many local grocery stores do this for free, in exchange for you signing up for a loyalty card (that comes with a small version that can clip on a keychain).

(I have two on my keychain, I sort of wonder who would "win" if I actually lost my keys)

Have you tried to recover (or return stuff) through a grocery chain card? It is worth the shredding of the sense of security you get. It is NOT their business.

Fair enough, but I've never lost anything (knock on wood) and so don't know about the difficulties here (I don't know what I don't know).

If you have data about grocery store return rates, sharing that information would help turn people to your cause.

I do hope the next iteration of QR codes involves steganography in beautiful images instead of these monstrously ugly and impersonal eye sores.

Who's up for the challenge?

Microsoft Tag - http://tag.microsoft.com/what-is-tag/custom-tags.aspx

Excellent. Unfortunately it may not be adopted because Microsoft is undoubtedly trying to make it "part of the Windows ecosystem."

I am no Microsoft fan, but their tag generation is now free (http://tag.microsoft.com/what-is-tag/benefits.aspx). However, the adoption is almost nothing ... almost comparable to the slim adoption of their Azure cloud.

And their scanner does work on Android. Didn't find one for iOS though.

"In the future, we may charge for certain enhanced features, such as more robust reporting or new types of Tags, but the basic features will remain free"

Not that I'm opposed to charging, but who wants to deal with such uncertainty with a technology like this?

I'm not a fan of Tag either but I was just sharing Tag for the sake of showing that something existed.

But I am a huge fan of Windows Azure! I've worked at 3 companies so far that are deployed on Azure and it has been a great experience.

I wish all smartphones manufacturers would build a QR code scanner into the built in camera app.

Here in the U.S. I don't think any manufacturer (Apple, Samsung, etc) have done this? Maybe it's because of patents?

On a different note .. love this idea and good luck to you!

Seems like a good idea, but it doesn't feel like a subscription service. Seems more like a model where you pay per incident would be more appropriate.

I am with IsThisLost service. We struggled with this concept and found that charging for recovery is very similar to purchasing auto insurance after the accident has occurred. If our cost per user is $6 and 1 in 50 users lose something, we'd have to charge the "recovering user" greater than $300 for recovery !!

Consider an annual license. 6 months for $10, or a year for $15.

A monthly subscription? Are you kidding me?

Or, you know, I could do that myself without paying you to intermediate.

The point is maybe not everybody can do that on their own and are you going to like woken up for a key in the middle of the night?

Losing keys should be fairly rare, to the point where one call in the middle of the night ever five or ten years should be OK... especially when the alternative is a monthly fee.

You can put this on your glasses, books, dvd's (if you have them and lend them out ;-), walking canes (now that's an image), all for a single subs.

Hmm, makes me think of making an ex libris [1] stamp with a QR code on it...

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookplate

I can't imagine a better domain name for your service. What other options were you considering?

Our vision is to build a global lost and found database, that is non-commercial. The question is how to get there?

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