*supercollider

The SNIF website is intuitive and easy to use. When you log in, you’ll find all the information your dog’s SNIF Tag has recorded: the other dogs he met, his activities and exercise history, and all kinds of helpful tools to help you understand the life of your pet better. The SNIF web portal keeps you connected to your friends, your neighborhood, and the rest of the dog-loving online universe.

The Internet of Things is hot news all of a sudden, with reports in both CNN and the Guardian in the last few weeks.

Now SNIF Labs, a venture from MIT grads, looks to be the first to bring the concept not just to products but man’s best friend as well — the family dog — with its product Sniftag.

The Sniftag is an RFID-enabled accelerometer, which uniquely identifies your pet, tracks his activity, and broadcasts his presence to other SNIF Tag enabled dogs.

Yes, it’s basically Nike+ for dogs.

Extending the comparison further, the website features online community features then let the dog owner find out more about the other dogs and owners in the neighbourhood and make friends.

As Cherryflava points out, the success of this would depend entirely depends on how many people use it, which at the $199 introductory offer seems like a tough ask, though people do love their dogs.

It seems more likely that a big brand like Purina or IAMS will invest in similar technology and price it at a steep discount in order to benefit from the long-term engagement with the audience and access to the community it’d receive back. Especially given the SNIF Tag correlates your pets activity tracking with nutritional intake recommendations, it would be a nice long-term digital play for one of those brands.

Cherryflava also makes a good point that the real story here for many dog owners may be less about tracking the dog’s activity, and much more about it being a dating service for the owners!

Beyond SNIF Tag and pet owners, it’s looking clear that plays combining networked products, apps and social communities are poised for huge growth and will inevitably be ubiquitous, possibly sooner rather than later. The question is what it will look like when all the products, brands and people are connected together?

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