Find My Car Smart Uses Bluetooth Smart to Geotag Your Spot Automatically

Geotagging with your smartphone is a useful tool for remembering where you parked your car, but only if you remember to geotag it in the first place. That moment of memory lapse is what Find My Car Smart aims to patch.

A new Kickstarter project, Find My Car Smart, uses Bluetooth Smart (a.k.a. Bluetooth 4.0) to automatically geotag your parking spot whenever you park your car. Here’s how it works:

On the car side, a Bluetooth Smart USB dongle plugs in to your lighter via a USB power adapter. Starting your car powers up the dongle, which connects to your iPhone 4S, launching the Find My Car Smart app in suspended mode. After you drive to your destination and park the car, the BT dongle powers off and that tells the app to geotag the location. After that, you can go about your business and when you’re ready to return, fire up the app to find your way back to the car. It works just like any other geotag system except the geotag gets dropped automatically, no manual input involved.

For now, the project is only for iPhone and only for the 4S since that’s the only one with Bluetooth Smart. No mention of other platforms yet, but Bluetooth Smart isn’t a widespread standard yet (aside from the 4S, the only other smartphone currently released with BT Smart is the Motorola RAZR).

A pledge of $25 gets you the dongle and the app, while $30 adds a USB car adapter to the package. They claim getting the dongle direct from a distributor (like this one) will run you $40. Given that I can’t find a Bluetooth Smart USB adapter for sale yet, I’ll assume they’re telling the truth on that. As of this writing, they’ve exceeded their goal of $10,000. Looks like another Kickstarter success story in the works.