StrayHat Crowd-Finding Adds Facebook Friends feature

"Users asked us for ways to extend the network of people looking out for important lost items" noted Patrick Chye, a StrayHat founder. "Users appreciate the anonymity of StrayHat, but sometimes they need more eyes and ears looking out for things, so we added the ability to share the burden with some close friends" said Chye.

Collaborative finding is implemented through a Facebook connect feature. Users use the feature can see within StrayHat 2.0 - when a Facebook friend loses an item, finds an item and retrieves an item. A user can offer assistance, provide comments and seek help from Facebook friends who are not yet on StrayHat by 'sharing' what item has been lost out to Facebook.

"The activity is managed by the StrayHat user, so its unlikely that a user seeks assistance from the community for $5 drink bottle, but if the $400 clarinet goes missing then its important that as many people as possible are on the case" said Chye.

Crowd sourcing, sharing and collaborative consumption are key trends in the market as demonstrated by the successes of AirBnB, GoGet or Task Rabbit. These are great examples of sharing the buying and consuming of goods and services. StrayHat is designed to leverage similar networks for finding lost property - particularly that of school aged children. The aim is to have school communities work together to find lost items and help get them back to busy parents.     

To add to the social elements of StrayHat, a new feature called "Social Tagging" has been added. This feature allows you to 'tag' a friends item and this will show on the users activity list. This is the first 'gamification' feature in StrayHat that will see social activity around a particular item of interest for a social group.