Outtake: 
You wait ages for a lost item tracker hardware startup, and then loads and loads pile in at once. There’s been a spate of such startups cropping up on crowdfunding sites in recent times — notably Tile, which raised $2.6 million via Selfstarter back in July, although it won’t be shipping product until next year. Others hoping to attack the space with similar Bluetooth-powered tags include the likes of Button TrackR, Lapa and Protag (with its next gen Elite offering), to name just a few. And now Locca, which has just kicked off a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo for a pair of item trackers, the Locca Phone and Locca Mini (pictured above left), that incorporate a range of tracking techs to offer longer distance real-time item tracking.
The latest low powered flavour of Bluetooth, colloquially known as Bluetooth Low Energy or BLE, is undoubtedly encouraging more startups to try their hand at item tracking. But Bluetooth has it’s drawbacks for an item-tracking use-case — notably it has a pretty limited range, of around 30 meters.
Tile is hoping to get around that by leveraging a community of uses to create a distributed...