If you combine a triangle and a hexagon you get a star. Two simple images explode into significance, beauty and purpose, but only when combined. Trackpac is a beautiful star that is now burning bright!
Markets may be ‘knocking’ crypto just now, but by using crypto as an engine to incentivise the building of a world-spanning radio network, a US start-up called Helium, recently renamed Nova Labs, has now enabled a ‘use-case’ tracking system, Trackpac, that beats all others ‘hands-down’ – like Wikipedia it improves over time and just maybe an asset tracking DAO might appear down the line.
In two years, uber-smart engineers (Neil + Rob) have designed Trackpac to deliver a new tracking technology, at a fraction of the cost for the typical GPS and GSM combo, and all available online.
How? Well, first Helium created the world’s largest ubiquitous wireless network. Then Trackpac realised that tracking anything and everything over Helium’s soon-to-be 1 million nodes was suddenly possible. Because you don’t see the nodes on every street corner you may not know that many thousands of these little black boxes are installed on numerous buildings across the world, all connected to the internet.
Householders and building-owners are continuously investing to grow the network by adding nodes and aerials which all data starts to travel through ‘your infrastructure’. Just as armies of ants move greenery, leaf-by-leaf, in the Amazon, the Helium Community, in two years, has created a network that would take a global telco over two decades to assemble.
If you want to geek out on this and really understand it @tushajain covers it elegantly. You can see that big bets have been placed on the new horizon and the opportunities that blockchain offers. Anything that offers lower cost and better service will always win-out long-term.
Many early B2B users have designed complex on-boarding systems and technical interfaces, but with Trackpac, a simple scan of a QR code and your mobile or web app is tracking your LoRa tracker wherever it might go.
In a way, the Helium Community, who are part extremely-technical and part crypto-hopeful, have acted as a perfect on-ramp for asset tracking and IoT in general. They want to bring data to the network to support their HNT Tokens that fuel the Helium network. Crypto is incentivising people to bring more things, or dare I say everything, online. Perhaps like the root systems of the Amazon, everything is connected and connectable through the Helium network.
In a technical world where there have been many runners and fallers, Helium has real-world business potential based on the lowest-cost operation of a robust network that will deliver total track-ability and the Internet of Things.
Download Trackpac here: https://trackpac.io/
Learn more about Helium here: https://www.helium.com/
