

Show HN: Touchables – your smart daily helpers - julianpye
http://www.touchables.io

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techmatters
Some comments:

I have 2 children who need to take meds and would want to buy 2 x medmanager.

\- Maybe allow customers to choose more than 1 of the same touchable type.

\- Can these be mix/matched across multiple devices ? Can touchables pair with
multiple clients ? Can you change the pairing ? More info would be useful

Love the video!

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julianpye
Thank you :) It works with multiple stickers of the same type. You can simply
assign them nicknames.

Basically once a touchable is used for the first time, it is assigned to one
person. If another person taps it, the first person then can add the other
person as friend and they can jointly use it and see the status in their
dashboard.

If a person has an iphone, they can also be added via an email address and get
email infos about the status. All text is done in a sweet and humourous
fashion.

The video was so much fun to create. Many companies in this space are big
telcos, so we thought we have to do something that noone else can do :)

As tech we are using NFC, which we are not highlighting, because it will be
ubiquituous like Bluetooth sooner than later and the name itself scares off
many people. The interesting part is that non-geek people who have tried them,
believe they are the same value as 'Tile', etc...

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julianpye
This all started as the winner of a Google and Allianz insurance sponsored
hackathon in Munich and won us flights and tickets to San Fran and I/O.

At the time it was a solution for elderly's people safety, but it kind of
pivoted a few times towards becoming a more gadgety solution. It's all
bootstrapped, we have had lots of fun with things such as the video and now we
really want to know what people think about it. The biggest lesson we have is
that the hardest thing is to communicate it without getting too complicated.
When people try it out, they get it right away.

~~~
atroyn
Two things immediately jump out at me - you need English localization, and
your carousel is currently broken (no matter which touchable button I select,
the text is always for the car button - running Chrome on OSX.)

As for the idea: I think it's quite neat, I think physical things people have
to deal with 'in the real world' work better for behaviour modification than
just notifactions which are easy to dismiss.

Is this out 'in the wild' yet?

~~~
julianpye
Thank you for the feedback. I need to check my localisation with a proxy. It's
a bit tricky with Appengine. It is live and ready to ship, but we have made
the touchables mostly for some company trials, but wanted to try out if we can
convince some consumers :)

~~~
atroyn
You might get a lot out of Nir Eyal's book, Hooked: How to build habit forming
products[1]. It would be interesting to see how the lessons there apply to
physical products like yours.

[1][http://smile.amazon.com/Hooked-How-Build-Habit-Forming-
Produ...](http://smile.amazon.com/Hooked-How-Build-Habit-Forming-Products-
ebook/dp/B00NW01MKM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1423687064&sr=8-1&keywords=Nir+Eyal)

