If you don’t follow me on Twitter, you probably missed the saga of my missing luggage during my recent trip to Berlin for IFA. A week in a lovely European city with no luggage sucks, but if I’d had Airbolt, a new travel lock from Melbourne based company Airbolt, maybe I could have avoided that.
The lock is Bluetooth enabled and controlled by an app on your smartphone to allow you to open the lock, set an alarm and more importantly for me: Track it. The luggage lock is a basic thing nowadays, and to satisfy the Americans, the Airbolt is even TSA approved, for whatever that’s worth.
The lock itself is about the same size as your normal travel lock, weighing in at just 60grams but it’s got a heap of smarts inside, including an alarm with speaker, Bluetooth 4.2, LED light, a battery that lasts up to a year and charges via a simple microUSB port and it’s tough, housed inside a die-cast Zinc body with a combination pad you can use to open the lock if you lose your phone.
There’s 40 days to go before the campaign ends, but it looks pretty set to make its target, and if it does, you can expect delivery around August next year (remember this is Kickstarter – No guarantees). There is a stretch goal at $300,000 of an Android Wear app which would be handy, but the app for your phone should be enough for the time being and an SDK is being released so an Android Wear app may come anyway.
If you’re interested in Airbolt, head over to their website, or if you’re sold and want to back them, then head over to Airbolt’s Kickstarter campaign page to throw money at them.
