We are quickly approaching the holiday travel season. Before you know it, airports will be packed with tourists visiting loved ones and mountains of luggage will be dragged, rolled and carried between air terminals throughout the country. CargoSense, a Reston, Va.-based startup that develops data analytics software and hardware for tracking high value shipments for clients in the pharmaceutical and food production sectors, hopes to produce a new product that has a larger clientele base than its traditional products. And they're using Kickstarter to fund their development efforts—of what they hope will be the best luggage tracking device on the market.
On Wednesday, the local tech company launched a Kickstarter page for a product called BagSentry. In just 48 hours, the product has attracted more than $1,000 from 14 backers. The final price tag for the product upon official release is unclear at the moment.
The funding via Kickstarter will be used to build the device's software backend, otherwise known as the auxiliary smartphone app, and to buy more inventory, among other things. The specific hardware model was previously created by CargoSense in partnership with Toshiba.
BagSentry is an internet-connected, Bluetooth-enabled device that fits inside bags to monitor their condition during travel. For those that have had a bag misplaced, a item broken or a suitcase damages during air travel, this product will work wonders.
The device can detect if a bag was opened, dropped, left in the rain and/or left on a tarmac during high heat. It is accompanied by a mobile app for managing different trips. After a trip, the app sends concise PDF reports of the journey. These reports can be used as evidence of different damage claims with the airliners, CargoSense claims.
The hardware piece, itself, is a rugged, re-usable sensor with a rubber-like cover, and has up to 60 hours of battery life. It is FAA/TSA compliant because it doesn't enabled realtime GPS. Instead, the device collects data, stored within the hardware, which is then shared with CargoSense upon connection with a computer through a USB slot.
The software program and tracking service is purchased and accessed through a SaaS business model. Per trip, it normally costs $3.99 to store information through the company's servers but early backers will have that service fee cut to $1.99 for three years, CargoSense said. Therefore, the cost of the product is two-part: device and a reoccurring subscription cost per trip.
According to the Airline Industry Consortium, 24 million bags were "mishandled" in 2015. Roughly 19 percent of bags transported by commercial airlines were either damaged or "temporarily missing."
