Home inventory goes digital in a new app
It started out as typical day for Carolyn Nolan and her family. She was out for the day with her five-year-old son. Her husband was busy in the backyard. The dishwasher was running in the kitchen.
But that day in 2011 ended with everything turned upside down after the dishwasher started a fire in the kitchen. No one was injured, but watching a restoration company pull all of your possessions out of your home is “very humbling,” Nolan says.
In the months that followed, the possession they missed the most was the simplest – their filing cabinet. They kept receipts of product purchases and product information in their filing cabinet, and having that information would have made the insurance claims process so much easier.
“But we didn’t have that filing cabinet for months,” Nolan says. “So you are Googling every piece of equipment in your home and show that this is what you had. It is a very long process. If I could have had one source of information from the get-go, it would have been so much easier.”
Now there is a free app called Encircle, developed by former BlackBerry executive Paul Donald that helps people compile and maintain an up-to-date digital home inventory, along with providing a library of product information.
Nolan, who met Donald in her role as the director of operations at the Accelerator Centre in Waterloo, thought Encircle was a terrific idea, given her own experience with a fire. “Really, you have no concept of how important a home inventory is, until this happens to you,” she says.
But the app isn’t just useful for fire insurance, says Donald, who founded Encircle last year. There are many reasons a person might need proof of their possessions, ranging from theft to divorce. The product information library could be useful for plenty of reasons, from finding repair people or parts for a product to being able to download printer driver software.
Encircle is currently available as a free smartphone and tablet app in Apple’s Mac App Store and the Google Play store, or you can create your inventory on Encircle’s website, encircleapp.com.
Donald had been thinking about a home inventory and consumer product database for years.
He left BlackBerry (formerly Research In Motion) in 2009 in the midst of an investigation over a stock trade he made as a result of information he got at a company golf tournament. He was later ordered to pay $150,000 to the Ontario Securities Commission. “There were some very hard lessons to be learned there,” Donald says.
After leaving BlackBerry, he became the chief operating officer and a lead investor in PushLife, a mobile entertainment platform startup in Toronto that Google bought for $25 million in 2011.
Through it all, the idea for Encircle kept coming back to him. There are other free home inventory apps, but they didn’t have the product support elements, Donald says.
“It seemed so obvious that you would think someone would already be doing it. But after researching it, I couldn’t find anything that would do anything close to this,” he says. “Yet there was no technological reason it couldn’t be done.”
Donald says most people don’t keep the pieces of paper that come with products. Then, if they need to find a manual, warranty or other information, they tear through boxes trying to find it.
The Encircle app makes it possible to have all of that information at your fingertips, Donald says. As more people use the app, the product library will grow. It will become “a living, breathing ecosystem that will support the consumer,” he says.
The free app is easy to use, but Encircle is also selling a service where, for a cost, someone will create the home inventory for you.
To use the app, you just take a photo of the product and the receipt if it is available, and then plug in any information you have, such as the model and product identification number, value, warranty and other information.
The information is stored on virtual servers in “the cloud,” so even if you lose everything, including your computer, you can access it from anywhere. “Once you have created the inventory, maintaining it is a breeze,” Donald adds.
You can email the inventory to an insurance broker or anyone you need to notify of a loss. By keeping track of the value of your items, the app makes it easy to determine if you have right amount of insurance.
The app is free because the plan is to build a large user base and then get revenue from a variety of sources, such as manufacturers, retailers and service providers, who might want to pay nominal fees to provide consumer notifications or education about products, customer-requested special offers, insurance quotes and other information.
“We suspect that in the long term, the majority of our revenue will be driven by the ecosystem that supports the consumer,” Donald says.
Encircle provides a way for manufacturers to proactively support their customers, he says. For example, users would immediately be notified through the app if there is a notice of a voluntary recall of a product.
That’s something that could have saved Nolan’s home. After the fire, she learned that her dishwasher had been under a voluntary recall, but her family had no notification of that.
Donald says, although Encircle isn’t his first startup, it is the one he is most excited about.
“I am really passionate about solving problems and this is all about solving a complex problem and bringing together an outstanding team of people.”
