Worldwide online lost & found service – Send Me Home

Websites
Share

send-me-home.jpg
There’s a new website just launched that plans to set the world alight with one of the dying embers of the dot com boom. Send Me Home is as good an idea as Communism in theory, if a lot more basic, and it’s going to be just as tricky to get it to work but, who knows, maybe they’ll be holding their own Olympiad in a few years’ time.

But I digress. Send Me Home is nothing to do with athletics and only slightly to do with left wing ideals. This new free to use service is essentially a giant web-based lost and found depot. The genius part is that they don’t even need a warehouse.

The way it works is that you sign up and then register any item in your possession that you think you might lose. You say what it is, what it looks like, what name it answers to and then put on its Send Me Home-generated unique ID number either with a printed-out sticky label or with a pen.

Should, Vishnu-forbid, you ever lose your precious item, you then go back to your page and enter your best guess as to where and when you lost it and any reward for its return. Then it’s all down to lady luck that a) someone finds it, that b) that someone doesn’t decide to keep it and c) that they know about Send Me Home in the first place.

If the answer to all of those is “yes” and that person then remembers, they go to the site, put in the tag number, up comes your plea for help and you can both chat about who’s going to pay for the postage.

send-me-home-screen.jpg

The whole service is a great idea but obviously heavily relies on how well it’s marketed. If no-one knows about it, it’s useless. Should they be able to get Send Me Home into the public consciousness and should their database boom, then we’re looking at something wonderful here. It would also rake in a truck load of cash for the owners and with hardly any work required.

Perhaps the only mistake they have made is to have a field where the lost item’s owner offers a reward. That’s not really in the spirit this service as far as I’m concerned and I’m not sure it encourages the good Samaritan attitude that Send Me Home will need to survive. I hope I’m wrong and I hope it works, and I hope I have the sense to label my stuff before I lose it.

Send Me Home

Related posts: Photobox Facebook app | More Eco

Daniel Sung
For latest tech stories go to TechDigest.tv