This modular location tracker from Jiobit is small and lightweight, making it easier for children to carry around.
Parents with toddlers know this too well. You turn around for one second and the next moment, your kid has run off somewhere. Jiobit’s co-founder and CEO John Renaldi shares his first-hand experience with TechCrunch.
The former VP of Motorola was at Maggie Daley park on a family trip when the incident happened. “Before I knew it – I can’t tell you how I got distracted – but in a sea of other children, I lost track of my son for 30 minutes,” he says.
Most of the location trackers in the market were big, bulky and not secure.
“I looked into all these products and they were all storing their certificate keys in the clear. They all were hackable,” he said.
So he built one for himself. To date, the device has raised $6 million since its founding in 2015.
The Jiobit tracker is small, measuring at only 37mm x 50mm. It is also very lightweight, lighter than 4 quarter coins. They didn’t go for a watch design because it can get bulky and some schools banned them as classroom distractions.
It comes with a built-in loop attachment for attaching the device to shoelaces, drawstrings or if carried in pockets. The secure loop, another attachment, allows you to attach it to belt loops, bag handles, buttonholes etc. This is a good option if parents do not want the child to remove it as it is a bit tricky to use.
Security
“Everything stored at rest – both on the cloud and on device – is encrypted,” he explains. The company uses a tamper-proof piece of silicon on the device. It is similar to what’s used on iPhones for storing credit card payment keys.
That’s a first in the industry for location tracking products,” Renaldi adds.
For more information, head to to Jiobit’s website here.