Fight bike theft with the open source bike registry

http://kickstarter.com/projects/1073266317/the-bike-index-lets-stop-bike-theft-together

by sethherr • 13 years ago

20 56 13 years ago

kickstarter.com

ipince• 13 years ago

Did I miss it or does it not say how it works?

sethherr20• 13 years ago

It's a ruby on rails.

You (or a bike shop) enters the serial number, and a few other pieces of information and your email and we send you the information. If you ever log in, all the bikes sent to the email you sign up with are connected to your address (and you can upload photos and information about the components)

You can check out the way it works at https://www.bikeindex.org

phinze• 13 years ago

I contributed. It's obviously a worthwhile cause, and their overall strategy seems sound. I also appreciate their efforts to bake the open source mentality into the project.

I hope they reach the goal and this gets big, because that's how it will be effective.

edit: following them on twitter turned up a couple of worthwhile articles: one on the economics of bike theft [1] and another review of locks performed by interviewing bike thieves [2]

[1] http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/30393216796/what-happens-t... [2] http://thesweethome.com/reviews/best-bike-lock/

sethherr20• 13 years ago

Thank you!

yoblin• 13 years ago

$6.99 to register your bike? What a joke.

bichiliad• 13 years ago

Gotta keep the lights on somehow, and plus it looks like you can theoretically just go to a bike shop and register there.

sethherr20• 13 years ago

It will always be free to register through a bike shop or an advocacy organization.

It shouldn't be tough to get registered for free ever - but by charging a fee we give bike shops a value they can give to their customers.

revelation2• 13 years ago

It's a barebones CRUD app that rails could probably scaffold for you, theres no engraving or anything going on, and they ask for 7$ and $50k through kickstarter?

Come on.

Local bike shops and cycling organizations here (Germany) offer what they call "Codierung", where they permanently engrave a number on the frame and register it with police along with your contact information for a few bucks.

sethherr20• 13 years ago

The app itself isn't expensive - it's the time and resources to connect with local governments (so police search the database too) and the expense to reach more shops and integrate with various point-of-sale systems in bike shops.

The idea of the police engraving anything into my bike is horrifying. And impossible for carbon bikes.

And once again, it won't be difficult to get registration for free. The reason that there is a fee is to encourage people to register their bike when they are in a bike shop rather than putting it off because they can just do it at home - plus, by adding a fee we will make it easier to track thieves who register bikes they've stolen.

ethomson5• 13 years ago

There's already a number permanently engraved on my bottom bracket, it's the serial number. Why would another number possibly help with this?

The missing piece is tying that serial number to me, and that's something that the local police in the US do not do.

toomuchtodo• 13 years ago

Obligatory The Oatmeal: http://theoatmeal.com/blog/apps

I make $7 in ~4 minutes; I'm sure almost all of us here make it in less than 10-15 minutes. Things we want cost money because people need to eat.

douglasfshearer• 13 years ago

"Use the bike index to show off your bike"

It doesn't describe or show how data will be available or searchable, but there is a risk that thieves could use this data to target specific bikes. I certainly take lots of care to not advertise what I have, where I store it etc, I can't see me rushing to pay to make this information available on the web.

jlgreco• 13 years ago

My understanding is that bike theft is so prevalent not because it is uniquely profitable, but rather because it is uniquely safe and undercharged. (it is rarely investigated/prosecuted, and even when you do get caught you aren't going to get nailed with much.)

Targeting particular bikes isn't going to work well then. To get particular bikes, not just bikes you happen to find on the sidewalk, you are going to need to do some breaking and entering too; a significantly riskier crime (and while you are at it, you might as well take the television too... if this is your sort of gig, chances are you are doing this with or without a bike registry).

sethherr20• 13 years ago

We make bikes public - but not ownership information, including removing location data from photos.

You can check out the way it works at https://www.bikeindex.org

You can also check out the code at https://github.com/bikeindex/webapp

Luc2• 13 years ago

This is done for free by the police in Belgium (and the Netherlands if I'm not mistaken). They use a hand-held engraver on the frame, and when they find an engraved bicycle they contact the owner. I think the fact that the police and not just the general public use the system is helpful...

sethherr20• 13 years ago

We're working on integrating with the police, it's the next step and a big part of the reason for the Kickstarter. But more important than the police doing it is bike shops doing it for free when you buy a new bike, before it leaves the shop.

Also I do not want the police using a hand-held engraver on my frame - it already has a serial number.

Luc2• 13 years ago

I guess you're talking about expensive bikes then, if they have serial numbers.

iloveponies• 13 years ago

Bike shops already do this in some places. In the UK and Japan at time of purchase you can register your bike with the police and it's handled by the store themselves. Both countries use the serial number imprinted by the manufacturer.

If there is indeed a problem of a lack of registration at point of purchase in your area, have you considered bringing this up with the cops, the shops and the politicians?

FireBeyond7• 13 years ago

DUPE: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6467431

I feel my comments still stand:

Ugh. So many problems:

1. It's a violation of "Kickstarter cannot be used to fund e-commerce, business, and social networking websites or apps."

2. This is a website, right? Then why: "Travel to the eleven biggest bike cities in the United States to meet with shop owners and give them the ability to register bikes for free (the cities: NYC, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Philadelphia, Madison, Tucson, Austin, Denver, D.C., and Minneapolis)."

(Awesome, let's use Kickstarter to pay for me/us to take a trip through the US "to meet with bike shop owners and give them a chance to use the website"...)

3. "Offer region specific recommendations for reporting bike theft to the police." - so an extended goal of this site is to "recommend how to report to the police, customized for regions"?!?

4. Some stickers.

5. Oh, and you have to pay to register with the Index. And they seriously want $50K for this?

Sorry for the cynicism... but this is a website, some stickers, and a tour of the US for the founders.

(I mean, the 'stretch goal' is effectively, 'we get to go on an even bigger tour to, huh, tell bike shops about our website')...

mjolk• 13 years ago

How is this worse than other Kickstarter projects? (serious question, this seems as legit as any to me)

FireBeyond7• 13 years ago

Actually, on reading the updated Kickstarter project, I feel I need to amend point 3, the "region specific recommendations" of the stretch goal are "send us to even more places around the US to talk there".

colmvp• 13 years ago

1. It's a violation of "Kickstarter cannot be used to fund e-commerce, business, and social networking websites or apps."

Diaspora was a social network.

FireBeyond7• 13 years ago

So Kickstarter is bad, and by all means getting worse, at enforcing their own TOS, as advertised. Does this make the point any less true? I understand that it's hard to derail a popular project that may violate your TOS when it's also generating you a commission on every dollar of backing.

na852• 13 years ago

Not to mention it won't prevent crime at all.

Lots of people will buy stolen bikes off craigslist, knowing they're stolen.

Others who are in doubt will still buy stolen bikes off craigslist because they will never learn about this niche website.

And thieves can just file off the serial no.

sethherr20• 13 years ago

I don't think many people buying bikes on craigslist want to get a stolen bike.

Bikes are stolen because they're easy to sell - check out the link someone posted here earlier: http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/30393216796/what-happens-t...

Rather than try to make bike theft profitable - you'd prefer to just say it won't work and give up?

sethherr20• 13 years ago

1. We're a staff pick and were project of the day last week, so they don't think we're violating their terms of service.

2. The whole point is to make registration convenient by having bike shops register bikes for their customers. We need to talk to the bike shops to do this.

3. The actual quote: "location specific advice for responding to bike theft." Have you ever reported a bike stolen? In Chicago you have to call at 2am to get someone who will take the report, and if you don't have a serial number you have to call a few times until you get an operator who will report it. More importantly we want to tell people about what they can legally do if they encounter a stolen bike - and how they can repossess it.

4. That was a reward created because someone asked for it. Sorry that you don't like it?

5. YOU WILL ALWAYS BE ABLE TO GET FREE REGISTRATION

FireBeyond7• 13 years ago

1. And there was a "buy my kid a laptop and send her to a summer camp" Kickstarter that made all sorts of headlines and, despite being blatantly against the TOS, they kept up. I'm sure the percentage of fees they kept had nothing to do with that decision (or the possibility of PR). Regardless, their TOS pretty clearly says "no business or social websites".

2. How many bike shops do you think you can cover in your tour? How many orders of magnitude more effective do you think your site would be if that money was instead invested in other promotional means, rather than visiting a dozen bike shops in a dozen cities, for example?

3. If police are so over-worked in a jurisdiction that that's how you have to contact them to file a report (versus the hundreds or thousands of municipalities that allow online report filing), what makes anyone think that giving them the ability to view a stolen bike report on your website is going to be more effective? I'm also relatively certain that a third party who encounters an /allegedly/ stolen bike has no real option to "repossess it".

4. You're right, I don't have to like it. And maybe if you get to $200,000 of funding, /that/ stretch goal can be "our team of eight will visit one bike store in every one of the 289 US cities with a population of over 100,000". It's quite close to the least effective possibly imaginable method of promoting such a service. You could take out full page ads in multiple bike magazines, sponsor events, and the like. But that might mean your team doesn't get to go on a road trip from San Francisco to New England.

5. If registration is $6.99 for me to do it myself, or go to a bike shop and do it for free (something I probably do regularly as a bicyclist), where is any incentive to do so? Or, as you mention POS integration, perhaps it's only free if you do it when you buy a bike. Or "if it's already stolen" (better hope you already wrote down the serial), somewhat edge cases.

ethomson5• 13 years ago

So, I'm still not sold on this idea, mostly because this is a huge problem and you're going to have to hit every link in the chain: the sellers of new bikes, the consumers of new bikes, the sellers of used bikes, the consumers of used (or stolen) bikes, the police...

If this idea has a hope of working, it will be because they were able to get a critical mass of people on board. This will require travel, face time, salesmanship, etc. Point #2 seems not unreasonable to me.

FireBeyond7• 13 years ago

What infinitesimal proportion of bike shops do you think a team of eight can cover with less than $50,000 of funding, to achieve said 'critical mass'?

Versus, say, manufacturer outreach, Facebook and Google advertising, event sponsorship, magazine ads?

RK• 13 years ago

How is this different/better than already established bike registries?

My bikes are registered here (for free):

http://www.bikeshepherd.org/

sethherr20• 13 years ago

Bike Shepherd doesn't solve the central problem of bike registration - how to register people who don't know about bike registration. It also doesn't offer a way of verifying used bike sales.

That is what makes the Bike Index different - we work with shops to register people's bikes for them, and we offer a way to verify bikes that you sell.

acgourley• 13 years ago

To the people running this Kickstarter I want to say: don't give up. It does seem like it won't fund at this point but the concept could be re-formulated. Certainly the interest is present!

ethomson5• 13 years ago

So, I like the idea of reducing bike theft (by virtue of making it not profitable), but I don't see the whole picture yet.

I have more than one bike (yes, I'm one of those dorks) and I would be fairly upset if one of them were stolen. But I also have their serial numbers logged at home, in a safe place, so that I could report that to the police if one were stolen and I'm certain that after doing so... nothing would happen. I'm guessing that if you see your bike get stolen and can somehow stop the thief that having this proof is useful to the police (who can hand it over to you). But 5 minutes later, once that bike is going... I'm guessing the police can do nothing.

So this helps by targeting the buyers? How many stolen bikes are really stolen to bike shops? I would think that a junkie wandering in trying to sell a carbon wunderbike is going to have much luck. And if it's targeting the end consumer... well, I would probably check this registry, but I'm pretty certain that a dozen other people won't.

sethherr20• 13 years ago

Sites like stolenbikeregistry.com and chicago.stolenbike.org have been amazingly successful at recovering bikes - their biggest problem is that people don't have good records of their bikes after they are stolen, and that people take too long to list their bikes after they are stolen - which are both problems that we address. And why we're working on providing a universal search so that all sites can access data together.

stormbrew• 13 years ago

I'd give to a kickstarter that was promising some innovative design of a bike alarm that's difficult to disable, personally. Solving bike theft post-theft seems improbable to me, aside from making it much much more expensive (by drastically increasing police effort and fine levels for it). I feel like a registry will never be much more than a half solution.

sethherr20• 13 years ago

We believe a registry is an important part of the solution. There will always be more tools and tricks that can be added on.

There was a bike alarm on Kickstarter, our friends the Bike Spike - http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1054587410/the-bikespike

And they want to incorporate registration into their project.

dfrey• 13 years ago

These crowd funding things leave a really sour taste in my mouth.

If you want investors, offer equity. If you want customers, offer product.

Theodores3• 13 years ago

I have spent a few years working on and off in the cycle trade in the UK, as mechanic, in sales and at the distributor/importer level. I have had just the one bicycle stolen however I have helped plenty of customers that have lost their steed(s).

The cycle trade is seasonal - May to September. There used to be a Christmas season but nowadays big box retailers have that business. During the season it is hard work making the sales.

Even though customers are highly available, converting them to sales and then getting the upsells (helmets), bike for the wife, big D-lock etc. is hard work. There is no time to hang about and a lot to get right (the bike has to be road safe with lights and other accessories, adjusted to them with not a scratch on the paintwork or even a greasy thumbprint). Typically customers haggle for discounts so it is not a simple checkout operation. By the time that the customer hands over the credit/debit card all concerned have had enough. They want to go home and the shop wants to move onto the customer behind them that has been waiting patiently for service.

At this stage the bike has typically been registered on the EPOS system complete with frame number. This frame number can be looked up for the purposes of an insurance claim, such an insurance claim guarantees repeat business for the shop so there is incentive for it to be recorded.

I don't see how realistic it is at this busy Saturday stage of a bike sale for sales staff to present your service to customers. It may be in some bike shops but it is not realistic for the pressured sales environments I have known, particularly if sales targets are being made from £300 bikes (where profit is not a lot when you have to pay a mechanic to assemble it and staff to provide personal sales service including things like a test ride).

You need to catch the customer when they get home. With the bike there is invariably a manual, one that is probably quite dated and poorly printed. In this there will be a manufacturer guarantee form to complete and send off. I have seen what happens to these - they end up in a box at the distributor with some vague plans for the details to be entered into some system some day for marketing purposes. 'What if they get their bike stolen?' is not even thought about. Similarly, with the Police, if they find a bike (which always has a serial number) then they do not think to call the distributor to 'just check who this belongs to'.

Hence, for your scheme to work, you need to ignore the shops and the importer/distributors. You need to have a quality bit of documentation in that manual that comes with the bike. When the customer gets home and does what they do with their new toy, that is the time to get them to register it, not in the shop.

There is significant lead time on bikes being designed, prototyped, tweaked, accepted, sent to manufacturing, sent back in a big container box, put in a warehouse by the docks, put in the retailers warehouse and finally making it to the customer via the shop. Bike designers are working on the 2016 range as we speak - that is the lead time.

You can try to convince 1000's of shops that your scheme is something they want to go with to find that in reality it isn't that simple. Or you can convince the small handful of bike designers to amend their manuals to include details of your scheme.

Right now there is no clear information from the top of the bike food chain about who the customers are and whether they are that happy with the product. I am sure that some brands are onto this but the one I know are a bit behind the times. They certainly don't contact the customers via email as far as I know. All of them would do well to look after the customers they have got rather than be forever looking for new ones - simple marketing sense. With your scheme and some enhanced manuals you could do this for them and help them build up a useful customer database.

Every bike workshop has a cardboard box in it full of manuals that should have been attached to bikes but somehow got lost behind. If those manuals had some customer friendly, no work for the shop needed wording to cover the theft angle then it would make it more likely that those manuals would go out the shop door with their respective steeds. Manufacturers want the manuals to go with the bikes, not end up in a box in some workshop. So you could help solve this problem for them.

Finally, the URL. It is not very good, is it? 'mybikehasbeenstolen.com' took me as long to think up as to write and I am sure that with a few more thought iterations I could come up with something that conveys they same sentiment more concisely. You need to put some more work into the URL, because at the moment it describes your code and not the predicament the customer gets into when the bike is stolen.

You also need to do a lot of work on the UI. Look at how second hand car sites work and how you can search by make and model with a few easy and intuitive steps. I don't think an omni search box is the way to go. From the off it is wrong - you need three calls to action, 'my bike has been stolen', 'I want to register my bike in case it does get stolen' and 'I want to check if this bike is stolen'. You haven't got that clear, it is far too 'Don't make me think!'.

If one of my bikes was stolen right now then I would not know the serial number, but I do know my email address. So I definitely see the value of what you are trying to do.

In the bike industry everyone knows everyone and it is a small world. There are trade associations, events, trade magazines and much else that you need to tap into. If you can get the trade body (I am from the UK so I don't know what it is in the USA) to back your scheme then you will be onto a winner. You wouldn't even need to go to Kickstarter for some miserly funds - with the right scheme they will give you more than chicken feed (but a lot less than what Lance Armstrong was paid to essentially sell bikes). Theft puts customers off buying big ticket bikes and everyone in the industry knows that is a problem that needs to be sorted out. If you get this right and approach the right people and get the right introductions at the trade body level you will push at an open door. They all just need to have a mention of the scheme in their respective manuals, the manuals that go out with all bikes.

sethherr20• 13 years ago

I worked as mechanic for quite a few years - the whole reason that I built the service was because I wished that I could do this for customers. We've had shops in Chicago registering all the bikes they sell all summer long. I do agree though - things get hectic, and we want to make it easier - which is why we're working on integrating with point of sale systems, so bikes are automatically registered at checkout if a box is checked.

And while we started the Bike Index to fight theft, we really don't think that it's the only use of the system - and we are focusing on registering bikes before they are stolen. So a name that highlights theft isn't our goal.

Honestly, all the nice bikes I've sold had beautiful up-to-date manuals (Specialized even includes a DVD), but no one read them anyway, so I don't think that's the solution. Especially when shops already have the serial number and manufacturer in their checkout system.

We do want to partner with manufacturers, but we want to make sure it continues to be a service for the biking community rather than a trick to get more marketing information for manufacturers. And to achieve that we need to approach manufacturers after already having a base - hence our Kickstarter project.

Theodores3• 13 years ago

Just how many of these shops are there that have been registering your bikes and how many bikes have they registered for you?

Do you have any idea about POS systems?

Because of how the industry for POS has developed (fragmented) you cannot guarantee that a POS system is online - it talks to a server in the back office and that code was written aeons before the acronym API came into parlance.

Shops stick with legacy POS systems because they have a database of customers and stock on there. To migrate to the all singing and all dancing POS system that will work with your system is not at all as straightforward or as likely to happen as you imagine. Staff training, hardware (to open the drawer and get the scanner working), cost of new software - it is just not going to happen, no matter how clumsy and visual-basic-y it is. There are even small bike shops that don't have POS!!!

You are in cloud cuckoo land if you think for one moment that you are ever going to get POS systems in bike shops to talk to your web service. Sure one or two hipster-shops in Chicago run by your mate who wrote his own POS system in Ruby on Rails with loads of angular.js one weekend, but I think you haven't any option but to completely forget about it for the majority of bike shops - even large chains with decent IT departments - it is so not realistic what you are talking about.

I haven't bought a Specialized for a while, however, historically, their manuals have been out of date. This goes for every other brand going and this has been the case for the last 25 years - yes I was mechanic 25 years ago so I know these things. Nobody watches DVD's by the way, do they?

People do read the manuals, not always and not cover to cover. With a bicycle what else do you do when you get home with a new one and it is gone dark - read the manual! Maybe not in Chicago, but, enthusiastic owners with a new pride and joy certainly do give the manual some attention. If it was spruced up with some online registration thingamy in there then think how much easier it could be. So I think you are being deliberately irksome by flippantly saying that nobody reads the manual - that is not a certainty. If the manual included a cheque for a million dollars in the back then I am sure that even people that cannot read would read the manual. If, like the UK brands I know, the manual is not exactly scintillating then it gets picked over and cast aside.

With the manual approach you get two bites at the cherry - in the shop by your mates in Chicago and, for everywhere else, something people can be prompted to do from the comfort of their own home.

You are being cynical thinking customers don't want to be marketed to. In an age when people put so much cr4p about themselves on Facebook etc. The guarantee/warranty form as means of building up a customer database has worked for at least a century. It is a trick but then it isn't perceived as a trick by people outside your bit of Chicago. If there is something in it for the customer - an actual warranty - they don't hesitate to sign up. It is that simple. Just make it online.

For any scheme such as yours to work it really does need to work for all stakeholders and involve all stakeholders. That means the customer, law enforcement, the retailers, the distributors, the manufacturers and the trade organisations (at retail and manufacturer level). What credibility does your scheme have if it is 'just a kickstarter project' rather than something that the important stakeholders have committed to?

I have read other comments on this thread and the dupe and I don't hear anyone saying this is just what the world needs. Sure my comments are unvarnished but I am trying to share with you my better ideas gained from practical experience dealing with the problem in hand.

The Bike Index name is not doing it for me. Have you seen just how good (or bad) the UK bikeregister.com site is?

https://www.bikeregister.com/stolen-bikes

I can look at what has recently been stolen in my area. The top navigation is clear and it Google paid-search-results to the top of stolen bikes. The police have their logo on it. There is a lot I would want to change about the site but it is getting there without any off-putting web design. It has a team keen on what they do with IT support, some sales potential for security products and it looks like they are going to stay around for a while. It works to the extent that it does without a lot of support from shops but with a lot of support from the Police. They have stakeholders. In the UK you would have to be a fool to go up against them or provide a new angle with some other service that is the same but more open-source-designed-on-a-mac-with-web-2.0-stuff. It has to be one place people go, not one of many (for a given country). The people behind bikeregister.com sell marker products. These are the slowest sellers ever in a bike shop, even worse selling than those face masks or arcane BMX trinkets (BMXers have to get mum to pay, don't they...). So they haven't got the right 'in' at the retail level. However, I have seen their leaflets around - in shops - so they have tried what you have been trying. Maybe you should talk to them rather than go off thinking you knows bestest...

People wanting to show off their bikes already have forums for that, forums that have online community whom you would want to share things with. I know a small amount of people that do such things because they have an angle - retro, weight or niche brand being the 'why'. Those into the sport have a passing interest in the kit, it is results that matter to them, hence showing off their latest steed is not their gig, if it is then 'weight weenies' forum it is. Sure 'weight weenies' (popular over here) may be some dated bulletin board thing but it works and you aren't USP enough to that crowd for them to shift over to 'bike index'. So this showing off one's bike thing is doomed, it dilutes the main purpose.

Sorry to be harshly negative, but you did post on here to get advice and sometimes people aren't honest when they say 'yeah babes fab!'. I hope for your sake that you don't take $50K of people's hard earned cash for this - you need a better plan and to come back later when you have got it. Don't stop the coding, the testing, the user experience testing and what you are doing in the bike shop already. Go bigger, just pick up the phone and talk to some other people who can help you - the UK bikeregister people could help you with ideas. Get involved at the industry level - go to a big trade show and speak to the top bods, bash their heads together and get an industry solution. Please give up on any dreams of POS systems magically doing it all, or at least visit a dozen bike shops and see what rubbish POS systems they actually use.

Fight bike theft with the open source bike registry

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