Hands-On With The WalletTrackR, The Gadget That Keeps Tabs On Your Most Valuable Stuff For You


When you’ve got a lot of things going on, it’s easy to lose track of where you left your mobile phone, keychain, wallet, or handbag — and the time you spend trying to find them just as you’re running out the door can make the difference between being on time or running late. It’s simple stuff, but it’s a pretty universal problem that hasn’t exactly gotten better with time.

That’s where a Santa Barbara, California-based startup called Phone Halo wants to step in. The company is focused completely on making useful little gadgets and software applications that help you keep track of your important stuff from keychains to, of course, phones.

Phone Halo’s newest gadget is called the WalletTrackR, and it could be its handiest device yet. The Wallet TrackR is a very thin and lightweight Bluetooth Low Energy-enabled device that slips into a wallet and tracks where it is at all times and hooks up to a companion iPhone app. Whenever the wallet and iPhone are separated, WalletTrackR alerts the user. It also tracks the GPS coordinates of exactly where the wallet was left.

Phone Halo CEO Chris Herbert was in San Francisco recently, so it was a pleasure to have him stop by the TechCrunch TV studio and give us a hands on look at his new product in action. You can watch that in the video embedded above.

I particularly like how he frames Phone Halo’s mission as ultimately freeing up your brainpower for things more important than where you left your car keys:

“We used to remember all of our friends’ phone numbers when we were kids, right? Now all of that information is on the phone. I think that someday we’re going to get to a point where we don’t keep track of where all our valuable items are. You’ll have all of that information on the phone. …You can use that brain processing power hopefully on something better.”

For now, the WalletTrackR is available only through a crowdfunding initiative to people who pledge $19 or more — we discussed it in the video above as being on Kickstarter, but that ended up not being the case, and Phone Halo is instead running a crowdfunding effort independently. WalletTrackR’s crowdfunding drive can be found at WalletTrackr.com.