Located at the Crossroads desk and printing stations in the Curry Student Center, as well as online, JackTags, a Northeastern startup, aims to reconnect students with their lost possessions.
“JackTags provides peace of mind in the event a valuable item like a phone, set of keys or other valuables are lost,” team member Katerina Robles said. “Instead of staying in a lost or found box, an item with a JackTag can help increase the chances of being returned to the owner.”
Either a keychain or sticker, each JackTag has a unique code that you can register with online. If you lose an item, you can log-in on the website and report the item as missing. If someone finds it, they can go to the website, report it, and hand it in to a secure location, after which you will get a text or email notifying you of how to get it back. Everything is run through the third-party of JackTags with no interaction between the person that lost the item and the person that found it.
Photo courtesy of Xandie Kuenning
A fourth-year at Northeastern, Arinze Iwudyke, had a successful interaction with JackTags after losing his keys. After picking up a set of JackTags from the Curry Student Center, Iwudyke chose to use the one meant for keys, because he felt the sticker would ruin aesthetic of his phone. Soon after, he lost his keys and used the website to report them missing. A few days later, he received an email saying the keys had been found and that he could pick them up in Curry.
“After that experience, I decided to put the other JackTag I had on my phone,” Iwudyke said. “We’re all busy and things happen. Better safe than sorry.”
The company is endorsed by the University as an on-campus safety program and currently has a partnership with the Northeastern Police Department.
Photo courtesy of JackTags
Founder Terence Simpson came up with the idea of JackTags after seeing his parents struggle with finding people’s phones and losing their own.
“In my dad’s line of work, he would always find lost cell phones and bring them home and ask if I knew how to unlock them and find their owner,” Simpson said. “Then one day my mom lost her cell phone and asked if I knew how she could possibly find it. So on the spot, we brainstormed and put a business model in place.”
The name Jack comes from slang in New York, where Jack means cell phone. Because the products are tags, Simpson created the compound JackTags to describe and market his creation.
Currently the startup is focused on heightening brand awareness at Northeastern, but in the future, it hopes to expand to other universities in Boston as well as to the Boston community as a whole.