Sleeping Beauty – Keep track of what’s where | Hacker News Reader

Sleeping Beauty – Keep track of what’s where

sleeping.watch

This would allow the company to create a database of geolocations of valuable things. Such a database would not only be a privacy concern, but an invitation for thieves. That would transform this alleged protection service into an actual security threat to all that stuff.

So:

Where is the tracking data stored? Only in the device? On some server? Who has access to it?

You need to hire a writer, or at LEAST a copyeditor. There's numerous mistakes and infelicities. You didn't do a good job of differentiating the different models - the first two sentences on each description are identical, so there's no need to include them at all. Like it took me way too long to understand that the "lock" model is actually a padlock. Also what is "interlending"?

You also need to hire a designer. The entire page is busy and confusing and doesn't communicate well.

The animation of the iPhone entering sleep mode - what is that supposed to communicate? It's too small to read its screen, so it looks like you're putting the phone into sleep mode. And then it vanishes, for some reason? Does sleep mode make my phone invisible?

The looping background animation is confusing, distracting, and too hard to see to communicate anything worthwhile - it's like a series of nonsense images (crying baby, gun, toilet paper, various signs, a bunch of calendar dates? what the hell is all that supposed to communicate?). The scrolling lags for no reason. The "features" and "connections" sections have icons that respond to mouseover as if to afford clicking, but don't actually respond to clicks. You have quotes not from satisfied customers or impressed journalists, but from the people who made the thing, which is completely pointless.

There is nothing above the fold that tells me what the product is. A youtube video doesn't count.

This really doesn't deserve downvotes - it is a very valid point (even if "the fold" arguably isn't really a thing).

Everyone and their dog has videos on their landing pages now, but I almost never want to watch them, because having to turn the sound on will disturb whatever else I'm doing - and, to be perfectly blunt, listening to my music is more important to me than your product in the vast majority of cases. If there is explanatory copy that is compelling enough to make me watch a video, then you've done a good job with the copy and that was worth it in and of itself.

Sleeping Beauty is a compact security device which protects and tracks your valuable possessions using a cellular network to triangulate its position.

Only if Sleeping Beauty is physically moved does it consume any battery power in order to send its location to your smartphone. This is the reason why Sleeping Beauty runs up to 2 whole years on a single battery, and why it's the perfect solution for protecting those possessions which should stay put for a very long time.

Almost any object can be tracked with Sleeping Beauty. And the real beauty of Sleeping Beauty is that it works anywhere in the world where there's cellular network coverage.

Just a little tip: we can get that information from the product page, I think most of us would prefer if you instead introduced yourself, explained the backstory, maybe some technical details, etc.

Nevertheless, a very interesting product and congratulations on launching. I couldn't work out how big the device was, however. I was wondering whether it would fit on the back of a watch (whilst the watch isn't being worn, I mean). If this was small enough, I could see this being very valuable for watch collectors.

I was wondering about the size too. One picture has a matchbox for comparison, based on that it appear to be the size of a hockey puck (about 8cm diameter) .

edit: 8 not 80cm!

Thank you for your Feedback!

We already have a working Sleeping Beauty hardware prototype and iPhone app. The size will be like a hockey puck. Sleeping Beauty uses a low self-discharge nickel–metal hydride battery(LSD NiMH). After 2 Years in sleep mode there is still 75% energy left.

For your watch I would recommend a NFC solution which is much smaller but you could protect the whole cabinet with Sleeping Beauty. I also just got the feedback to use it for a firearm locker - so there are many use cases.

Just to be clear: tracking your dog with Sleeping Beauty will discharge the battery within a short period, just like any other device. But Sleeping Beauty will protect the Porsche convertable in your barn for two years instead of two months.

Does it require a SIM card? Does the cost of the device cover GSM data anywhere in the world?

The costs for the mobile service plan for each Sleeping Beauty device is around $2 per month for worldwide coverage.

Do you compute the GSM triangulation yourselves or do the carriers perform it? I'm curious, I thought that was a carrier-only feature, and only for "security" purposes

You can compute it inversely, by seeing what antennas are around the device, and then using the known position of those antennas (from a database like OpenCellID[1]) to compute your own position.

[1] http://wiki.opencellid.org/wiki/What_is_OpenCellID

At first, "keeping track of your stuff" set me into thinking this was supposed to be a way to find lost keys or something. I had a difficult time figuring out what the device would do, and how it would do it, for the examples in the video. I had to read further into the description to figure out for myself that it's a puck you place in/on things and it just alerts when it moves.

This information is exactly what it missing on your website. You should put this text there, rather than in the HN comments.

Thank you for the feedback! We will put the text on the website.

Thanks for taking the feedback seriously. Would you mind also replying to the questions in comment #1 of this thread?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9575904

Do data plans exist exist in the US that can make something like this not cost at least $20 or $30 a month? Like, something where you pay by the byte?

If so, I'd love to know about them. I have a half-dozen Opengear ACM5000 cell modems that I use to monitor telemetry. On average, I use 5 kilobytes per month - they wake up once a week or so and transmit a few hundred bytes.

Even on T-mobile's lowest data-only plan, it costs about $20/month per device.

There are a number of companies that specialize in this. You basically pay by the KB and it works on nearly every GSM network globally.

Search for "M2M sim" and you'll find these services.

Thank you! I think you just saved us a ton of money. I didn't know about that term.

Ditto on the thanks. I've got a number of projects that would benefit from this, but I couldn't justify the data cost.

What about sending the data via SMS? T-Mobile has a $3/month plan with 30 text messages. 30 * 160 = 4800 bytes a month. Could probably squeeze more data through with the 30 voice minutes but you'd have to do analog -> digital somehow I assume.

Isn't one of your examples of sleeping beauty in a shipping crate, surely there wouldn't be GSM signal in that scenario, in the ocean?

Call me a skeptic, but it's hard to imagine there are still people that will preorder hardware in this manner. So many people have gotten burned by Kickstarter or Indiegogo or even products by established companies like the infamous and elusive KarmaGo[1].

Maybe there is an alternative funding source you can use to build your initial run of products and instill confidence that it is actually achievable?

That would also help you understand how long the development and production cycle for hardware is - something that continuously surprises a lot of teams.

[1] https://blog.yourkarma.com/karma-go-on-track-for-may

We don't sell Sleeping Beauty you can "Pre-Order" and take the survey to get a 20% Voucher as soon as Sleeping Beauty is purchasable. We know how hard it is to build a hardware startup and we don't want to disappoint potential customers with Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaigns without delivering the product.

How big is the device? How much does it weigh?

Came here to ask this as well.

There's one animation that I think compares it to a matchbox. Except the object is camouflage-colored, for some reason?

It appears to be cookie-sized. At least, that's the only scale I was able to see.

It will have the size of a hockey puck. At the moment we are prototyping so please apologize for not being that precise.

Every second or third time I try to load that website is responds with an error. Also, it loads very slowly.

Sorry, we never had this much traffic - try to fix it!

Cannot abide laggy scrolling

Great idea!

It could have the option to send its location only on request, using in daily driving cars. Or even better if you are close, it could know about it somehow (bluetooth?, NFC?) and stay in sleep mode.

I was thinking about a similar thing, by creating an app which does the same, buy a low-end phone with GPS and hide it in my car.

You write that the battery life is 2 years. But is that with it waking up once a year, or is it once a day, once every 6 hours, every hour?

It overcomes the power supply issue in an ingenious way: the battery life is profoundly extended because Sleeping Beauty only consumes power when the object is moved. When Sleeping Beauty is standing still, it remains in sleep mode and doesn't consume any power at all.

Seems the web site is having some troubles...

just wanted to leave a kind advice: put some hints that the page already loaded .. I was looking at the "Zzzz" animation, and believed it was still loading. I almost closed the tab!

Anyways, best wishes for the product!!

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