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Comment by SleepingBeauty | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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

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