A Phone App That Does What?

It happens to more people than you'd think. 

One day, Bill Pauling– a realtor from Minnetonka– was pulling his car into the garage like usual. 

"I forgot about my bike (on top of the car) and did some damage to the car, the bike and the garage," Pauling said sheepishly. 

After telling some friends about what he'd done, several of them admitted that it had also happened to them. 

After considering a device that would attach to the car, they came up with an idea using today's technology instead– an app.

And Bikesavr was born. The Bikesavr app employs geolocation technology that sounds an alert within a radius of the chosen return address. Bikesavr could prevent costly damage to bikes, equipment, roof racks, garages and cars, by reminding the user just before returning home. 

Pauling and his friend Nils Hansen, a designer from Minneapolis, jotted down ideas of how they wanted Bikesavr to work. Then they created a wire-frame model of their initial idea. After researching and interviewing a few companies that make apps, they chose Blue Earth Interactive– a company out of St. Paul. Together, they created Bikesavr.

Then, Pauling said, came an exhaustive amount of field testing.

"There are so many different variables when using GPS," he said. "Every phone, depending on what version of the phone and what operating system it had, handled GPS a little bit differently."

Once Bikesavr was ready, they submitted it to Apple for approval. "And they did in our case," Pauling said.

From the first whisper of the idea to availability in the iTunes App Store, the process took about four months. They were anticipating two months– mostly lengthened due to the GPS factors.

Pauling and Hansen own Bikesavr, but the 99-cent app is basically sold for them. They get 70 cents of each sale.

"We've been getting really good ratings," Pauling said. "We don't anticipate that we'll make any money because of the marketing and the money we had to put into it, but it was a fun project."

Bikesavr has been available since the beginning of March in the iTunes App Store. The Bikesavr website counter claims 8,034 bikes have so far been saved.