StrayHat - stopping school property being lost

StrayHat the 'crowd-finding' platform has released its latest range of functions to make the management of school and students lost property easy.

StrayHat is an Australian developed solution that helps busy parents manage their kids property. StrayHat consists of a smartphone app, smart labels and a communications platform that helps parents manage items and to reclaim lost items. StrayHat has extended the capability by developing a range of new smart labels that can be applied to items. The additional functions include:

* Management of School property such as Tablet and Notebook computers

* Lost Property Bin Management functions

* 3rd Party Printer support

Schools are looking to roll-out fleets of tablets like iPad's or Notebook computers in primary and secondary sectors. A typical scenario involves the school buying devices and loaning them out to student families. Most of the schools focus goes into purchasing the devices, associated applications, device management and teacher training resources. Although there is significant capital expenditure schools have limited budget for managing the assets, manual system are the norm. These solutions are inward looking and schools having little control until the end of year 'stock take'. Information about things are being shared more readily nowadays, and StrayHat sees this as a market opportunity and developed a solution to address the need. "StrayHat creates a unique range of tags, that allow a school to brand their items, to loan them to students at the start of the year and reclaim it at the end of the year. The school knows when an item is lost and when it is found via the Stray Hat lost property system." said Patrick Chye, a co-founder of StrayHat.

The second new school development is the support of Lost Property Bin registration and tagging. Although many people label and tag their property, the missing information they need is where it is and when it was placed there. The StrayHat solution for Lost Property Bins addresses this: when an item is placed in the bin a label applied and tagged with basic details such as an item description and the owner. This information is gathered by the StrayHat system and published to that schools unique StrayHat Lost Property page that parents can then search.

Finally, the StrayHat platform is now available for 3rd Party Label printers to licence. This allows a printer to add StrayHat codes to their own labels and to re-sell the Lost and Found functions. This is now available globally and StrayHat offers a range of ways to interface to printer systems and online stores. Interest for this feature has been strong and the first installation is expected to be in Latin America. 

These functions are available in StrayHat V2.0 and available via Google Play and iTunes App stores. StrayHat has obtained an Australian Innovation Patent for these functions.