ottomon

In Los Angeles, driving is a necessity. The average person has to drive at least 30 minutes to any destination. The 405 freeway is known throughout the entire country. No matter how many lanes they add, traffic catches up and jams the roads. With so many cars around, parking becomes a nightmare. And when parking is a nightmare, everyone snatches the first parking spot they see. The problem is it's not always obvious if you are allowed to park in a spot. Park in the wrong spot and it will set you back $68 to $163.

In an ideal world, we would all write our names, phone numbers, and addresses on any object we own. If they get lost or are in a situation where we need to be contacted, reaching us is as easy as reading the information on the item. But as the world gets more and more connected, privacy becomes a real concern.

Up until this point, if you wanted to contact someone about their car, the quickest way would be to leave a note on the car. This means the owner will only see the note when he gets back to the car. And even with that, you have to hope the note won't get blown away by the wind, or gets washed away by rain. More realistically, I often wanted to leave a note on a car and I did not have a pen or paper to do it. So how do you contact the owner of a car?

When someone receives a message at ottomon, it is not only because we are hard at work supporting a system of complex infrastructure to deliver the message. The technology that powers ottomon is great and was built on the shoulder of giants that generously made great tools available to us and the whole world. We try very hard to make it as efficient and redundant as possible. But the system only works because **YOU** are part of it.

One thing that makes any startup founder feel special is the word *partnership*. A partnership with big established companies gives you the impression of success. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft offer their partners discounts that help startups get started. It is tempting to add *in partnership with Google or Microsoft* on your MVP. It makes your service seem more legit. But in reality, all you are is a customer with a coupon code.

When we looked around the web for other websites providing a similar service, we thought why follow the old model of telephones system on the web? When you tag a device of yours, you have to pay a monthly fee to allow people to contact you about it. It definitely make sense for the service provider since they all need to make a living. But it does not make much sense for the user. It's like saying "Pay or we won't tell you if someone finds your lost device."

Keys are essential. Lock yourself out and you end up having to restructure your entire day. Lose your car keys and you can't get in your car and you have to pay a premium for a replacement. We can’t help but lose our keys, we are human. But because we are also human, we can do two things: minimize the chances of losing them, and have a plan of action in case we do lose them.

A few years ago, I had found a new job. As most jobs in tech, it required an intensive amount of sitting. To combat that, I went on a 15 minute walk every few hours. I also took the stairs instead of the elevator. One day, while on my exhausting stair climbing run, I found a pair of Bluetooth earphones.

As a new service available to all through the web, ottomon is launching today. This is an effort to combat perfectititis. The common condition that stops many projects from seeing the light of the day, because they are not perfect yet.

ottomon is still in its alpha stages were a few select users are chosen to test the product. As it grows and becomes more useful to a larger crowd, more resources will be needed to run it.

Ottomon is a smart object tagger. Tag any object with an ottotag and you allow it to communicate basic information.

I have spent some time trying to figure out what it the best way to build a prototype. Ottomon is supposed to be a fully functional website and an App on both Android and iOS. However each of these require its own sets of environment to develop properly.

My name is Ottomon. On the day of my birth I received a job and my job is my purpose.