One of the largest self-crowdfunding campaigns ever – Tile – has announced they are preparing to ship their finder devices to early backers.
The pretail crowdfunding campaign launched back in 2013 and blew past their initial $20,000 goal within minutes of launching. The campaign closed at over $2.6 million. The device continued to offer precommerce even after the “close” of their campaign. The device is a standout examples of hardware crowdfunding that has ushered in a new era of product development and delivery. The PR firm that aided in the Tile strategy of the self-crowdfunding campaign, Wareness, has now gone on to direct several other self crowdfunding projects such as COIN and Moov.
Tile capitalized on a simple need of finding lost items by providing an elegant yet simple hardware device. Attach a Tile to keys, purses, phones etc. and using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) the small device will send a signal back to the users iPhone. The concept benefits by leveraging a crowd approach as the Tile will communicate to any iPhone that has the Tile App installed relaying the location back to the owner via interconnected smartphones.
Tile was founded by Nick Evans and Mike Farley. Evans had previously worked with Pebble Smartwatch and Lockitron – developer of the Self Starter software the the Tile campaign utilized. The fast growing company quickly differentiated their product in a space that soon became crowded and successfully captured follow on funding from Bessemer Investments.
Tile was expected to ship their first round of devices during the Winter months but production has been delayed until Spring 2014. The company has partnered with Jabil, a US based manufacturing company, to produce their hardware.
For the past months the Tile team has been running usability studies on the device and have submitted the app to Apple for acceptance into the App Store. The company indicates they will be shipping hundreds of thousands of Tile devices.
Tile continues to accept orders with next published shipping dates of Summer 2014.
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