The users have the opportunity to use the following community based features:

• If the collar breaks they get a notification that the pet is let loose.
• They can find each others missing pets and notify the owners via SMS or a phone call.
• If their pets are in a hazardous environment ( high or low temperature ), they get a notification.
• They can communicate with other members of the community.
• No need for constant battery charging, the collar supplies itself using piezzo-electronic discharges that supply the battery using the dogs kinetic energy.

During the development we had the following problems to solve:

As an idea, Fellow teams vision was ready, but its specification was in a really early stage. We had to work out the details and make them viable using current technological tools and solutions. To achieve this we constantly had workshops with the clients during which we were capable of refining the idea efficiently. To honor our investment in their idea they have given us a share of their holdings. This step produced a fully detailed user story and a technical specification that made the project ready for its first development stage.

Our next challenge was the hardware integration since the software development was in a much better state and was ready for integration much earlier. For this reason we had to create a bluetooth hardware mockup to simulate the physical tool. We created an API and a scripted simulation for pet data.

The app store release was another challenge since apple needs a detailed video demo using our features, since we had an external tool ( the collar ) integrated with it and they are very strict about security.

It was a great opportunity for our company since we had full control right from start. We defined the scope of the project starting with the user stories straight to the delivery criterias, furthermore we gained beneficial experience with Apple’s Bluetooth stack.