

Fight bike theft with the open source bike registry - sethherr
http://kickstarter.com/projects/1073266317/the-bike-index-lets-stop-bike-theft-together

======
FireBeyond
DUPE:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6467431](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')...

~~~
sethherr
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

~~~
FireBeyond
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.

~~~
sethherr
1\. Ok.

2\. Let's say 15 shops in the 10 cities.

3\. The third party will undoubtedly need to call the police. But what are you
allowed to do until they arrive? And what will they do when they arrive?

4\. Y'see, we aren't aiming to go to 289 cities. We're aiming to raise
publicity and interact with bike shops in the areas of the country that a lot
of bikers live. Individually approaching all the shops in the country isn't
feasible and would be stupid. But joe average shop owner in nebraska will be
much more likely to sign his shop up for the Bike Index if he knows a shop in
NYC that he follows on twitter has.

5\. We aren't looking for serious revenue through people paying for
registration. Bike shops benefit when you visit them - so they're happy to get
you in there. And we're giving iframe forms to bike advocacy organizations
(like EBBC) so you can register on their site (for free). We also go to events
and register bikes for free. But we think the service is valuable, and people
are much happier getting a registration for free that would've cost 6.99
(which to us still seems like a pretty good deal - the national bike registry
charges $10 and throws away your registration after 10 years).

~~~
Theodores
> But joe average shop owner in nebraska will be much more likely to sign his
> shop up for the Bike Index if he knows a shop in NYC that he follows on
> twitter has.

That is so wrong on so many levels but hugely comical!

'joe average shop owner in nebraska' is condescending, patronising or
something not exactly respectful.

'joe average shop owner in nebraska' is actually working too hard for a living
to be on Twitter. He works a long week and that is a six day week with a late
night opening. Every morning is early for him. He stands on hard concrete
floors when he is not rushed off his feet. He certainly is not following even
his own arse on Twitter.

'joe average shop owner in nebraska' would not be following a trendy NYC
bikeshop on Twitter, hanging on their every tweet.

Even if he was then do you think that the trendy NYC bike shop would mention
Bike Index on Twitter and 'joe average shop owner in nebraska' would notice
that tweet and go about some religious conversion to the Bike Index cult?

~~~
sethherr
Having worked in a shop in ruralish Indiana I can tell you that winters are
long, no one comes in, and the internet is a magical wonderland.

We made pixel art, checked every webcomic to see if anything new was published
and raced bicycles around inside the shop. And we read a bunch of bike blogs,
all the time, every day. We sure as hell would have been on twitter if it
existed, if only to mock other people.

Also, only a fool stands on concrete all day. You put down a mat or at least
some cardboard.

------
douglasfshearer
> "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
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).

------
Luc
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...

~~~
sethherr
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.

~~~
iloveponies
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?

~~~
sethherr
That's what we're doing.

------
ethomson
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.

~~~
sethherr
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.

------
phinze
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...](http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/30393216796/what-happens-to-
stolen-bicycles) [2] [http://thesweethome.com/reviews/best-bike-
lock/](http://thesweethome.com/reviews/best-bike-lock/)

~~~
sethherr
Thank you!

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

My bikes are registered here (for free):

[http://www.bikeshepherd.org/](http://www.bikeshepherd.org/)

~~~
sethherr
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.

------
yoblin
$6.99 to register your bike? What a joke.

~~~
revelation
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.

~~~
sethherr
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.

~~~
revelation
The reason they engrave (or use multiple stickers, for carbon and others) is
that the frame number is not as unique as you might think it is, certainly not
unique among different producers, and always requires some central database.

You simply haven't solved the major problem here, which is one of
discoverability and easy, decentralized lookup.

~~~
FireBeyond
"Beyond a reasonable doubt":

"So, you're claiming that this bike, which has a frame number that matches the
one reported stolen, is in fact a different bike with the same frame number,
one on which both producers neglected to brand in any way shape or form, and
that you have no record of purchasing..."

------
stormbrew
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.

~~~
sethherr
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](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1054587410/the-bikespike)

And they want to incorporate registration into their project.

------
acgourley
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!

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

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

------
Theodores
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.

~~~
sethherr
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.

~~~
Theodores
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](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.

~~~
sethherr
MerchantOS.

I do appreciate your passion, I would love if you would contact me through the
contact form on our site
[https://bikeindex.org/contact_us](https://bikeindex.org/contact_us)

I'll respond immediately, I feel like we might be able to figure out our
disagreements if we just chatted together.

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

~~~
sethherr
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](https://www.bikeindex.org)

