KEYS PLZ – App

If I could design an app, it would be called Keys PLZ (pronounced Keys Please). My friends and family are always on me about how many keys I carry around on one key chain. And truth be told, the reason I purposely carry around so many keys is that I can easily dig in my purse and find the keys. Having only one key per key chain just seems like trouble waiting to happen. Hence, I feel the need to create this app and tool system that would serve as keys.

These are my current set of keys. Another set is currently MIA.

Here’s how I see it working:

On your iPhone you download Keys PLZ. Open up the app and a security screen will pop up and ask you to insert a 4-digit code (very similar to how iPhones can be locked). Once you open up the App, a screen will pop up with all of the customized keys that you have added to the app. This then requires that keys become electronic in some way in order to simply have a bar code on your iPhone that serves as a key. You would then hold that bar code up to a small electronic screen on the lock, and this would then grant you access to your locked car, home, safe, etc. (I’m envisioning this acting similar to the bar code you can use as a boarding pass at airports.)

All in all I am sure that there would be some glitches and some would worry about their iPhone being stolen, hacked or lost. But I would argue that the very same things could happen with keys. The beauty of this app is that dirty, old keys would no longer need to be carried around. Further, the app could have the option of “sharing keys” with others – eliminating the need to go to a hardware store to get a key. Now some would say, what if you shouldn’t have access to share keys. Well, only administrators of that key could share the keys and the program would track who and when they shared keys.

Writing about this idea now has me all excited about this app. I’m sure something like this will be coming about in the near future. Until then I guess I’m just going to have to continue carrying around this set of keys (and hopefully will find the other set that I misplaced too)…