Hi everyone!

It has been a while since our last update. Thank you so much to everyone who’s been helping us and for your interest and patience.

Again there has been a high increase of interest in petTracer and we now receive multiple enquiries every day, which is great. However our main focus, as you may have guessed already, lies in bringing petTracer to you as fast as possible.

We have been super busy during the last few months and even throughout the summer holidays. Having successfully completed another prototype iteration we are now preparing everything for our extensive field test. We had a long list of potential test users and have now made our choices. Within the next few days we will send out an orientation-email to each test user. If you are not among them, we hope there are no hard feelings, it was a difficult process and we needed a very diverse pool of testers.

Another area we were working on is our website (trace portal). All basic functions are being implemented, ready for the field test and we have made good progress so far.

Currently, we are also undertaking improvements towards the final serial production. Some manufacturing steps can easily be done by hand in a prototype but are by no means suitable for serial production. At the moment we need to find the optimum way for the mass production; the perfect combination of cost effectiveness and the highest possible quality. This also means that some electronic components need to be replaced and re-assessed.

We would like to give you two examples that lead to delays during the last few months:

• Identical electronic components (same type and model) bought at different places seem to be exactly the same but they are not. This was very confusing and doesn’t make it easy at all. And as if this was not enough, we also discovered that 10% of the components were broken. This means that we need to do component tests ourselves, costing us a lot of time and effort.
• During our last prototype phase we produced several petTracer cat collars in different colours. Everything was identical except for the colour. One worked perfectly, the other didn’t. How is this possible? We then figured out that some manufacturer use all kinds of horrible additives in colours and some of them have a negative effect.

On the other hand, technology in general has made good advancement and we managed to solve certain problems because of it, which is great.

The assembly of 50 petTracer sets and extensive testing are our highest priority for now. We estimate to be ready for shipping by the beginning of September and tests will last approximately one month. We should then be able to give an accurate prediction by when we can ship the remaining collars to our Indiegogo backers and shareholders. This is dependent on the number of issues arising during the test month and the time needed to resolve them. Many have asked us for another pre-sale. The date for this is also dependant on the outcome of the test results.

During the testing period our engineering team will keep on working together with the manufacturer on completing the manufacturing processes.

We really push top quality for the GPS cat collar. Quality in this sense is defined as the collar being very lightweight, has an extensive batterie life and is very precise when it comes to locating your cat and your recording cats track. It is not about dumping a half done product on the market, which no body can use. But as in many cases: “good things need time”.

Once again, thank you everyone for your interest in us and for your patience. We are doing everything we can to bring petTracer to you as quickly as possible.

Thank you
Alan & Claudio