Protecting your loved ones and belongings from going astray has become big business in China in recent years. Location tracking devices are seeing increased adoption, paralleling other trends in smart tech and wearables. Two of the market favorites are are Shanghai based startup Eachpal, who secured US$488,000 in funding last year, and Singapore startup Watch Over Me.
One of the latest offerings to come on the radar in China is Korea-based startup Spacosa, that is behind the app ‘Famy’ and portable safety beacon ‘LINK,’ which is designed to trace the location of your family and loved ones as well as belongings. The company launched its service in China’s 16 app stores under it’s Chinese name, Baobei zai nar (translated as ‘Where is my baby?”). Within a year the app has recorded a total of 1.2 million downloads worldwide.
“According to our last year’s data, 73% users were Korea based, then comes Taiwan, Japan and mainland China. Seeing this year’s data, overseas user rate is picking up.” Spacosa CEO Wooju Cho said.
A user on Famy can supposedly check a designated member’s location on a map and access the address. Using the Google maps and Baidu maps API as well as its own calibration engine, Famy provides a stable location tracking as well as saving user’s location history for 10 days to show all routes and past locations. Once a user is in danger, an SOS widget will alert the user’s family members with a phone call. In order to avoid Famy being used as a Panopticon for tracking certain person’s place, users can turn off their location to insure privacy.
Starting with just 12 members from Hanyang University, Spacosa received an undisclosed amount of angel investment in 2013, followed by Primer and Korean government grant -TIPS (Tech Incubator Program for Startup Korea) in August last year.
45% of Famy’s users are either families tracing their children or those who have older parents they worry about wandering. Since the Famy app can only track location on the app, the team released ‘LINK’ this February, a portable beacon that works as a location tracker to prevent a child, pet or even personal belongings from going missing. With a geo-fence function and crowd GPS, LINK alarms the user when it goes out of a certain range of distance.
The business model is based on location tracking combined with other industries. Cho added, “By analyzing our accumulated big data on the location, we found out that most users have less than four frequently visiting spots. Targeting the users’ routes, retailers can send a recommendation prompts to nearby customers.”
As a part of D.CAMP chosen top nine ‘Geeks from Gangnam’, the team will be participating in TechCrunch Shanghai 2015 as well as visiting Shenzhen’s hardware companies.
Image Credit: Spacosa
Interesting article