I receive plenty of press releases throughout the week and last week I received an intriguing one from a company called KeyMe (www.key.me). The headline: “KeyMe Launches in Philadelphia with Next Generation Key Kiosks to Save and Copy Keys in 30 Seconds or Less.”
I might not have found this a good fit for ENX/The Week in Imaging if I hadn’t attended the recent Konica Minolta dealer meeting and witnessed how openly that company is embracing new technologies and services that on the surface don’t seem to fit the traditional document imaging company or dealer model.
KeyMe’s kiosks are starting to crop up across the country and allow customers to store a digital copy of their keys in the cloud and create a spare copy in less than 30 seconds. This can be particularly handy when keys are lost. All the user needs to do is find a KeyMe kiosk and create a new one using the information about their key stored in the cloud. KeyMe supports most home, office, and mailbox keys.
The press release reports that “traditional key duplication services have 10-15 percent error rates when attempting to replicate these keys as a result of their ‘tracing’ methodology. KeyMe’s advanced digital imaging technology resets keys to the factory specifications, adjusting for wear and tear and resulting in a key that’s more accurate than the original, another value-add for customers in addition to the ease of convenience.”
The kiosks can also copy car keys, both with transponder chips and those without, eliminating the need for users to pay car dealership prices for a replacement or duplicate. Car keys can be scanned at the kiosk, which reads the transponder, and ships a copy (with tracking code) in under two days. Prices start at $19.99 for non-transponder keys and $64.99 for transponder keys.
Kiosks are also integrated with the free KeyMe mobile app, allowing keys to be saved, accessed and then printed at the kiosks or via mail. According to KeyMe, the KeyMe iOS mobile app has hundreds of thousands of customers storing their keys and a new Android app is set to be released in the coming months. To access a digitally-saved key at a kiosk, it just takes a fingerprint scan to verify identity, at which point any saved key can be easily printed in less than 30 seconds. Saved keys can also be shared with family and friends via e-mail at both the kiosk and through the mobile app.
From where I’m sitting this is a brilliant concept and it’s not a stretch to think that this technology might someday find a home somewhere in the office imaging and office products channels.
With the cloud, so many things we couldn’t have imagined before are now possible and this is another example.
Thanks for reading.
