Photo: Kurt Morris (fabrication) of TechFarms and Oksana Kolesnyk (software development) of Teknika have worked to produce a Daily Adventure Box prototype. Photos by Valeriia Radchenko).
As an active-duty member of the U.S. Marine Corps, Shay Putnam is familiar with morale, welfare and recreation programs and facilities at military bases. That awareness was part of the inspiration for the Daily Adventure Box, a locker intended to make unattended gear rental transactions possible.
At this writing, a prototype locker is nearing completion at the TechFarms business incubator. Teknika, a tenant at TechFarms, has developed the software required by the locker and has led the Daily Adventure Box project.
“Shay secured some funding at the height of the startup funding bubble and got in touch with us at TechFarms,” Teknika CEO Frank Eastham said. “His plan was to make rental lockers, primarily for hotels and condominium resorts.”
The lockers were to be large enough to hold snorkeling kits, inflatable paddleboards, beach equipment, snorkeling kits and the like.
Eastham explained the Daily Adventure Box’s operation.
“You use a mobile app to pay for the rental, unlock the locker, retrieve your gear, use it for the allotted time, return it and take a picture inside the app, showing that it has been checked back in,” he said.
When he hooked up with Teknika, Putnam already had lockers that had been fabricated from metal. Too, he had an agreement with August Home, a maker of smart locks marketed for residential use.
That agreement, which Putnam viewed as a significant competitive advantage, entitled him to exclusive use of August Home locks for adventure box purposes. He was extended access to the lock maker’s SDK (software development kit) — the information needed to create an app that would interact with their locks.
Putnam engaged Teknika to develop that mobile app. All was well until August Home was acquired by Assa Abloy, a large conglomerate that owns Yale Locks and other companies.
“They turned to Shay and said they weren’t going to do that (exclusivity) deal anymore,” Eastham explained. “Without support and access to the SDK, our app becomes nonfunctional. That was a big setback for Shay’s business.”
Teknika, working in conjunction with TechFarms, came to the rescue.
“We told Shay that we could make an electronic lock for him that he would have full control over,” Eastham said. “He would never be held hostage. He’d control the intellectual property.”
Teknika subcontracted with TechFarms, who had employees capable of developing the integrated circuit board that goes inside the lock. Prototype locks were 3D printed. Teknika reworked its app to make it compatible with the new lock.
“Today, the work on the lock and the app is 99 percent done,” Eastham said in late February.
There was also the matter of the lockers, themselves.
The metal lockers produced by a fabrication company were an invitation to corrosion. They were expensive and welded together as a unit that could not by efficiently shipped.
“My background is all about that kind of stuff,” Eastham said. “I was a mechanical engineer and prototype developer. Designing a locker is as much in my wheelhouse as running a software company.”
Eastham assured Shay that Teknika and TechFarms could combine to make a much better locker that would be less expensive, made of plastic and thus much lighter and could be assembled from sheet-type materials flat-packed just like IKEA furniture.
Eastham credited Ben Collier and Kurt Morris of TechFarms with speeding the work of building a new locker prototype. And he said that the TechFarms/Teknika team is prepared to modify the old steel lockers owned by Putnam to accommodate new locks so that they can be returned to service.
Startups need funding, of course. Putnam had exhausted his seed money in developing an app for August Home locks, and didn’t have money to invest in a new app.
“So Teknika did a deal where we received equity in Daily Adventure Box in exchange for discounted software development rates,” Eastham said. “We are partners now.”
All concerned look forward to taking the Daily Adventure Box to market, anticipating that in addition to hotels and condos, military bases — especially given Putnam’s connections — and possibly municipal park and rec departments and the owners of Airbnb’s will become customers.
