According to the FBI there were 221,936 bicycle thefts in the United States for the year 2008.
A German startup, named Mybikenumber.com helps you avoid becoming one more statistic, protect your bike and track it down no matter where in the world.
Mybikenumber.com is a free service that allows you to register your bicycle world-wide. You can also register bicycle parts like frames, suspension forks, gear change and wheel hub. All you have to do is sign in and register your bike (and the components you choose) to get a unique number and a QR-Code, which you can print out and stick on your bicycle frame.
What you need to know to register your bike is the frame number, which you usually can locate under the bottom bracket. The QR-Code can be read by most mobile devices so that you can check on the spot whether a bike is stolen. You can register more than one bike and upload pictures of each bike and its parts. Once you do that you can check the status button and report it stolen, lost, or sold to a new owner. The service facilitates bike dealers by giving them a “dealer code” for all the bikes in their shop.
Through the site you can check if the bike you are planning to buy was stolen simply by entering the bike number in the search field. If it is registered on the site you can send the owner a private message to get in touch with him.
What I love about this site is the use of the QR-Code, making it so easy to check the status of a bike while on the go, just be smart about placing your ticket people, once the word about this get out, the aspiring thieves will be a lot more careful.
Keep being green and safe!
Ah cool. I set up a similar service 4 years ago called BikeTAG. It was a crazy idea and it generated much free publicity in The Netherlands. The idea was that you had a unique number attached to your bike and others could text that code to a mobile number which triggered an email with the phone number of the person who ‘found’ the bike.
Of course it is fairly easy to get rid of a sticker or engraving on a bike, so it was not to prevent theft, but in Amsterdam only 20.000 bikes are towed away by the local authorities on a yearly basis.
It was a fun experiment (was 2 weeks during summer I didn’t have to much on my hands), but it will be very hard to build a real company out of it/
I wish them all the best.
Would be nice for the 750k bikes stolen in the Netherlands every year. Hopefully people will put in the effort to register.
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Regardless of what service one chooses to use to register one’s bike, it is of the utmost importance to TAG it in multiple places, as shown at http://www.bikeregistry.com/install.php .
If nicked the perp will almost certainly strip away all the stickers he can easily see. The one he misses will be his undoing…..