One of the cooler gadgets we saw at Disrupt this year was the new Retrieva GPS dog tracker. Completely redesigned, this device lets you track Fido wherever he does roam and will let people know where to take him or her if lost.
The device lasts about a week on one charge and will go into sleep mode if it hasn’t been activated in a while. I sat down with the company founders and their stuffed dog to discuss the technology.
guys I was walking through Startup Alley. John Biggs here, and I met Gibby here, who’s the dog, and Ryan and Sinet [sp?]that and they have a new product called Retriever which I was actually facinated by so this allows this creates a live animal out of inanimate objects. Is that right?
Yeah, exactly.
Is that how you do that?
So you just wait a few minutes.
retriever. So it’s like Pet Cemetery, you bury the thing and it comes In back.
Kind of.
That’s excellent. Alright. Well, thanks for. So, it is a GPS tracking advice for pets? So, the way it works is you buy the device. You put it on the dog’s collar, it attaches to most collars, and then on the web or on your iPhone or Android device, you can say hey, where’s my dog now? And it updates, by default, every fifteen minutes.
And you can also have virtual fences. You can say, if my dog leaves my house text message me. If the battery is low, text message me. And then on top of that we’ll have you know location based deals, services, or. You know checking in, or you know, where my friends who also have this device. So there’s a lot of opportunity.
Sort of like Foursquare for pets?
But they don’t have the mental capacitySo, they can do Foursquare themselves. You do it.
No.
They do it with the collar around their neck.
Yes.
I see what you’re trying to say. Are you trying to say dogs are stupid?
Dogs don’t have an opposable thumbs so, it’s hard to use an iPhone.
So this thing, this is a prototype? Yeah, this is basically one print out of a three model. We have a couple of Alfro types that we’re testing right now. Okay. So this is basically, this is the right size and form factor so we can test to make sure it fits and works. All right, the obvious question here is why? Why do I need thison my dog all the time? Unless I have a runner and he’s crazy and he likes to run around. Why would I need something like this on my dog? So, one in three pets are lost and four million are euthanized every year because they can not match the owners with the pets. And there’s other solutions, like RFID, dog tags and tattoos, but those solutions do not find your pet. And in the case of RFID or microchips you you have to find the pet and hopefully you have the right, the shelter or the veterinarian has the right scanner. So in our scenario, the dog’s location or the cat’s location is sent to our app and you can. It’s shown on a Google map and you have turn-by turn-directions. So, what if Fido runs away and this thing runs out of power? That’s a good point. Can you disable the dog like LoJack?
Not really, but we do text message you if the battery’s low, and we do have some our firmware and hardware will do some smart things. The battery is getting low and we know you’re not charging when you go put it to sleep. And then only when you need to know when your dog, where your dog is. You can say, where is my dog right now? What you do is put a little mini USB thing on there, so the person who finds it, can charge it. Like say hey. Yeah. You found my dog. Yeah. And we’re gonna put a sticker on the back and it says, “If you find this, call this number. You know, here’s the ID number.” And we know we can figure out
Now presumably right now this is for bigger dogs cause this is a huge thing. Yeah so this is pretty small compared to our competitors and you know in the future we will be doing more revisions and improvements to make it smaller and lighter. It’s actually quite light. It’s under 1.5ounces. Okay. And you were talking about batteries. So our battery life on average is about seven days. Okay. We actually did a nationwide study, and people are so familiar or used to charging their cell phones every night, most everyone said, “Oh, now worries. We’ll just plug it in every night.” All right. Super. So when is this ready to go? December 2011? That’s what we’re planning.
Yeah, we’re planning to do some pre-sales starting in October and then we will be able to deliver product end of December.
I wish you could sell this on like Sky Mall right next to that, like, the cat toilet. Sure. People love cat toilets. That’s your next project, the cat toilet. That tweets. You heard it here first. Retriever’s next project is the cat toilet. This is called Retriever. What’s the website? Getretriever.com. Getretriever.com