” — the fear that your phone will run out of power.
The company’s goal was “to solve the problem of the dreaded dying phone battery. We would build, deploy and manage — free and secure to customers — these phone-charging lockers in retail stores, so people would spend more time shopping while they waited for their phone and spend more.”Baldasare contracted a manufacturer to build boxes with eight secure units that would be placed in clients’ stores where shoppers could charge their phones.
fee. By then, Baldasare and his team had raised $30 million in early-stage funding from Philadelphia-based Robin Hood Ventures, New Jersey-based Soundboard Angel Fund, and local tech millionaires. Another quarter stopped working over any given three-month period due to hardware, software, or WiFi glitches, and were piling up in bins and back shelves, untracked, until they were swept into repair bins for possible fixing.
ChargeItSpot’s solution was to design and contract construction of a larger unit — the Asset Recharge Center or ARC — with sensors that scan a user’s badge; on recognition, pop open the door with a user’s assigned device; and automatically check it out.