The Gadget That's Better in Crowds Than Your Phone + Ring’s Founder Before Amazon Bought It | E2349

Totem Compass is a screen-free pendant designed to help people find friends or family in crowded places. Its nine-axis motion sensor and satellite positioning indicate a companion’s bearing and relative distance; the light brightens as the wearer gets closer and joins the other person’s crystal when they meet. Carter Fowler said the device’s median positioning accuracy over the past year was about one meter, typically five to 15 times as accurate as a phone. He contrasted that with phone GPS drifting 20 to 150 feet, especially in crowds, where phones may show full bars but still fail to send texts or load webpages.

Totem combines signals from multiple satellite constellations with a 2.4 GHz peer-to-peer protocol for second-by-second updates and its Unity Mesh Network, which relays messages between nearby devices without cell towers or other infrastructure. More devices can extend the network by forwarding messages, including for people the owner does not know, while traffic management helps conserve battery and bandwidth. But the mesh has a cold-start problem: at low adoption, long-distance connectivity can be weaker. At Lost Lands, Totem’s highest-adoption event so far, more than 5,000 people—over 10% of an estimated 50,000 attendees—used it. The network recorded 35 hops, carried more than 330,000 messages over the weekend, and connected users more than 1.5 kilometers apart offline. Fowler said it could still function with about 500 devices, or roughly 1% adoption, though with potentially weaker reach.

A single Compass costs about $88, and four-device bundles are the most popular. Fowler said the average group size has risen from about 2.6–2.7 to 3.8–3.9. Early sales sometimes came at cost to seed the network; the original single-device price was $49, with units in purchases of five or more priced at $37. Totem reported gross margins of about 58% over the preceding month or two, and raised $1.3 million in a pre-seed round plus $1.6 million through crowdfunding. The core device is a one-time purchase, and the company does not plan to withdraw network access from customers who do not subscribe, though optional premium subscriptions and other revenue streams are planned. About 30% of recent purchases came through recommendations or people seeing a Compass at an event.

Fowler said Totem collects aggregated, anonymous network data without personal details or a way to connect a device to an individual. The company monitors changes in network topology, and he said the data’s value lies in its fidelity and granularity. A crowd-flow prediction model, in development for more than a year, is intended to help event organizers simulate changes such as adding an exit, stage, or kiosk; a pilot was expected within three to four months. Totem also plans offline texting and social networking over the mesh, neither of which was yet available. For people who attend events infrequently, Fowler proposed rentals at $30–$40 for a weekend or $15–$20 for a day, with a pilot expected around New Year’s Eve that year.

Festivals are Totem’s largest adoption area, but ski patrol teams in Colorado and people in blind and deaf communities also use the devices. Gen 1 Totems lack haptic vibration because the early design prioritized battery life. Fowler said the visible compass lights can help people with limited sight follow a direction in a crowd; many blind people retain some vision but cannot see clearly beyond a few feet. He also described an Australian parent’s report that Totems worked better for his children than other trackers he had tried, including $500 Apple Ultra watches, as a customer anecdote. The device still depends on satellites, but Totem is developing dynamic trilateration to locate users within a mesh without them and exploring solar charging. Fowler’s longer-term aim is a self-sustaining system for finding people and communicating when other systems fail.

The Ring interview was recorded on January 13, 2017, a little more than a year before Amazon bought the company. Founder James Siemianoff described himself as an inventor, not a businessperson, and said he wanted to build a meaningful business with broad impact. After PhoneTag, which sent voicemail to Manila for transcription before Nuance bought it, and Unsubscribe.com, which earned nothing from users, he sold the latter and returned investors’ money in full. Following a personal “meltdown,” he set up an incubator in his garage, hired two people at his own expense, and began testing ideas. When the team could not find a Wi-Fi doorbell that would let him hear the bell from his garage, he soldered together a roughly $50 prototype. Visitors asked for one; the product began as DoraBot and became Ring. Siemianoff said he rushed the clunky early hardware because the company needed to survive.

Siemianoff said inventing a new device category made fundraising difficult because investors did not yet understand the product. One expected investor, a friend named Luke who had brought in others, backed out at the last minute; Siemianoff estimated that investment might have returned 50 or 100 times its value. He said early-stage investors must judge whether founders will persist, adapt, and handle money responsibly. His goal from the start was to take Ring public, not sell it, because he thought an acquirer would not understand the scale of its vision; after three funding rounds, he said he wanted to take it public that fall. He was budgeting $5 million for products expected to launch two years later, spending he believed a conventional executive would not allow.