In his book Shaping Things, Bruce Sterling imagines a future where objects are tagged, tracked, and all tell their own stories. He calls these objects “spimes.” I read the book years ago, but it was the first thing I thought of when I visited SendMeHome.
The site is wacky but brilliant. It lets you register any object with a unique code, which is printed out on a small sticker that you place on the object. The object can be anything from your wallet or iPhone to a beloved frying pan. Ostensibly, the purpose of doing this is that if you should ever lose the object, anyone who finds it can contact you through SendMeHome. By entering the code on the sticker, they can learn anything you’ve decided to share about yourself or the object, and can contact you anonymously. SendMeHome offers this service for free, but charges $3.99 for a pack of stickers. (It doesn’t get involved in actually getting your item back to you).
The lost-and-found feature is the only practical reason you would use the service. But once you’ve attached a sticker to a favorite object and registered it on the site, there are other things you can do with it. You can tell a story about the object, pass it around, or put it on a mission. It is on its way to becoming a spime,. These spimes are “always associated with a story. . . . they are protagonists of a documented process,” as Sterling once described it.
SendMeHome lets people create a very rudimentary version of a spime. Anyone who enters the code found on the SendMeHome sticker can add to the object’s story in a blog-like format which incorporates Google Maps, YouTube videos, and uploaded photos. For instance, here is the story of a disposable camera that was left on a bench in LA with instructions for passersby to take photo with it. (They did). And here’s another one of a bacon frying pan, which instructs people to cook their favorite bacon recipe in the pan, document it with photos, and pass it along to another bacon lover. Every object has a story which SendMeHome lets you unlock.
There are flavors of the social game Akoha here, with its bar-coded cards and playful missions set in the real world. SendMeHome should be getting more social itself now that it has a Facebook app and has integrated its site with Facebook Connect. To encourage people to use its new Facebook app, it is putting up prizes worth $1,000 for whoever can create the SendMeHome stories on Facebook with the most followers by May 4.
The company has been bootsrrapped with $50,000 from founders Andrew Lee and James Tamplin.
As someone who would lose her head if it weren’t attached, I’ll be checking this out!
I love the “spime functionality” – reminds me of the Flat Stanley projects school kids do. Or something out of a Tom Robbins novel!
absolutely ridiculous.
Why would I go to a site and order stickers and whatnot, when I can just make my own with my mailing address?
jesus..
or e-mail address…
Because many of the items you have you don’t want to put your contact info on. House keys, for example. Wouldn’t want to tell someone who finds them where to go to steal your stuff. Besides, what if your contact info changes. Do you want to relabel everything?
F.A.I.L
No, think of the tie-ins… Give away items to charities, and see how they’re used and where they end up. Cool feedback for donors.
Or put one on one of those rental bicycles in Paris, and track the stories.
Or send objects on ‘missions’, like the Australian tradition of stealing a garden gnome, taking it on a trip and sending back pictures to the owner of their gnome at famous landmarks.
The possibilities are, well, if not endless…
I just love the idea too, except SendMeHome, should be renamed to BuildMyPersonalProfile or GiveMyPersonalDataAwayForFree. Isn’t this just rebranded RDIF technology, where little chips are already built-in to the shirts, socks, etc you buy, so that when you walk into a store, your clothing already broadcasts your past purchasing history?
Can you get the number and URL etched into your bicycle frame? Because registering it with the cops is pointless, but maybe if potential buyers could check up on the bike from their iPhone, they could politely decline to buy the bike as too expensive, then call the cops on the seller.
Why do you have to pay for stickers? They should hand out small code numbers and let people write them on anything. Like a tinyurl.com address for stuff, together with wheresgeorge.com style history for those things that move around.
If it was free you could put a number on everything you give to Goodwill and leave comments on your former possessions. Nobody would pay for stickers to do that though.
Hi Andy – We do give them away for free. We even have templates for you to print out yourselves. Go look at the site.
you must be kidding right , is the recession soooooo bad ? , have you even tried wieving the page in IE8 , i mean has it come to this , any “high school kid with below average HTML skills ” gets exposure on techcrunch now , please
Touchatag http://www.touchatag.com/ uses an RFID sticker and a RFID reader on a PC for the same idea.
This site has the dumbest examples of use I could ever imagine! This technology and concept is very promising, but how many people are willing to pay to use allow their coffee mug to open a specific link on their computer?
Bruce Sterling must have some solid contacts at Techcrunch – or maybe he’s just friends with Erick.
I like certain elements of this concept, but what I’m still wondering is… what is the use of stickering your stuff?
Unless it is a message in a bottle… most people don’t have their stuff floating around dozens of people…
hmmmh……Stickers? what if i wrote my name on my stuff and wrote a blog about it? would i have to pay for this service?
The SendMeHome service is free… so no : )
http://axees.ea....clickbank.net/
Good for people who tend to lose things (me). But if it is valuable enough for me to tag, it is probably valuable enough for someone to keep.
I had an idea like this, but it’s more useful (and harder.. and probably exists). Basically attach a micro-GPS sticker in anything: ipods, phone, keys, etc, so if you lose it you can track it and see where it is. Hard part is making it as small as possible. Again, probably exists
IDEA -Use it to track re-gifts. Which have travelled around the world the fastest? Which have been passed on the largest number of times? Etc. My father-in-law gave my wife and I something called “The Mist of Dreams” (an oddly designed ornamental humidifier). He later fessed up given to him by a student in China. Of course, we passed it onto someone else. My guess, it’s still unopened and making the rounds.
There are already other services that provide this service. (After losing a camera, a phone, and a thumb drive within six months of each other, I started using http://trackitback.com , but I can’t tell you if it works, because I haven’t lost anything since putting stickers on everything!)
Most such companies tried the “pay for stickers; service is free” model, found it didn’t work, and started charging for service. So unless these guys have some miraculous source of funding their competition doesn’t, I don’t see them doing any better.
An example of miraculous sources of funding: I think I’ve got four different grocery store discount cards attached to my keychain right now that provide a “if found, send to” service. They can afford to do that, because it’s a rarely-used service subsidized by their real business models. A return service attached to a larger corporation can work. Doesn’t Google like to say it can find anything?
The story idea is cute, though. Cute, however, doesn’t pay the bills.
ImHONEST.com has been doing this for a while, except for that they actually provide a service through their tags. They provide 24/7 reporting and the logistics so that a lost item can be returned at no cost to the finder at The UPS Stores – the finder even gets a reward worth $30 of their tags. I’ve been a customer for three years and love the service they provide, it definitely beats writing my name on my iPod, besides that way it is private and anonymous.
I have no idea whether this site is any good because I can’t use it! Here’s what it looks like in IE8 (which I have to use at work):
http://i42.tiny...com/2ic3881.jpg
Wait, people are still using IE? Seriously though thanks for the heads up.
And go get a real browser.
1) The site is awful and looks like a weekend project 2) Staples can help you do this (put e-mail address and phone number on assets).
>> The company has been bootsrrapped with $50,000 from founders Andrew Lee and James Tamplin.
And I bet they spent $25k to buy placement of this story; FAIL.
hehehhee….. interesting
I always find the companies interesting at TC, even if sometimes I know that I won’t be a user. But this site is just pointless, sorry, just buy a sticker and that’s all.
And I don’t see the relation with Akoha… beyond the use of paper.
Very cool idea from one of my favorite authors. It’s funny because Akoha was in part inspired by Bruce’s incredible short novel, Maneki Neko.
http://tqft.net...iki/Maneki_Neko
The entire category of Internet Object Tracking is an exciting domain for Web meets world whether for gaming, social experiences or augment reality experiments. Will be interested to see how people start to innovate when we use not just TCP/IP on the intertubes – but start to really tie our physical spaces with links to Internet data.
-Austin
Interesting to consider SendMeHome, TouchATag, and TrackThis together as a general movement towards both locative and communicative objects. Combined with the coming ubiquity of sensors from folks like Crossbow and the SPIME scenario gets closer & closer.
If I’ve to put stickers on my stuff, why not directly put my phone number or email on it?
Do you want to put your trackable contact info on your stuff? What if you lose your car keys? Do you want people to be able to find where you live?
As Andrew said, you might not want to put personal info on the item. If you put a landline number on an item, it’s not that hard to find out where you live.
Also (and this doesn’t apply to SendMeHome, because they’re web only), most commercial companies providing this service put a toll-free phone number on the sticker, so the person finding your item doesn’t have to call long distance. TrackItBack claims to go the extra crazy step of having multilingual operators standing by, just in case the item is found by someone who speaks a different language than the item’s owner. (In fact, some of their stickers are English/French bilingual.)
This is a great idea. Perhaps in iPhone app next?
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Best of luck to them. Interesting concept, but I think it’s going to be an uphill battle…..$4 for a pack of stickers?
One of the founders (not the one who keeps commenting here) used to intern with us, was an incredibly talented and hard working guy.
Not sure what to think of this idea, but he was a great actor too: http://www.staf...iting-star.html