In this week’s SmartDevice roundup we’ll be featuring one of the most successful self-starter crowdfunding campaign to date, a tracking device, and a small chip that could harness the power of the sun to charge your smartphone.

Tile

Tile, the tiny Bluetooth Low Energy device for keeping track of the small, or big, items in life, managed to raise a total of $2.6M in funds from 49,586 customers in just 34 days.

With an initial funding goal of $20,000, in less than eight hours after the selfstarter project launched Tile was able to achieve these funds.  From then on, the money just kept piling up, adding an average of $100,000 or more per day in the last two weeks of the campaign.

“The enormous, positive response we’ve received from everyone during the Selfstarter campaign has been very exciting and encouraging,” says Tile co-founder and COO Mike Farley. “The Tile community has grown significantly over the past month, and we’re very much looking forward to significantly increasing its reach in the years to come!”

Users will be able to manage and track multiple Tiles with the use of an iOS companion app, be able to determine how far you are from a Tile, check for a Tile’s last location, “ring” a missing tile so you can track it down, use your friend’s Tile app to locate your missing Tile, and a lot more other features that would help people locate their things faster and easier.

The first batch of Tiles will start shipping in Winter 2013.

Nokia’s Treasure Tag

The Finnish company is said to be preparing to launch a proximity sensor accessory that would be compatible for its Lumia Windows Phones.

Dubbed as the Treasure Tag, this device is equipped with Bluetooth 4.0, NFC to track items from a phone, and a battery that lasts up to six months without charging.  The Treasure Tag works just like Tile in the sense that you can place your Treasure Tag on any item you wish that you usually misplace.

Each Treasure Tag can be paired with your Lumia Windows Phone, and an app will allow users to track down missing items.  The plus for this is, if it’s your phone that has gone missing, the Treasure Tag has a special button that you can press on and it will send a notification to your phone, provided that it’s within range, so you can locate it, too.

Solar film

Researchers at UCLA have developed a new two-layer, see-through solar film that can be placed on windows, sunroofs, or even a smartphone screen to harvest energy from the sun.

In 2012, a tandem-structure transparent organic photovoltaic (TOPV) device was developed at UCLA, but the downside of that project was that it was only able to convert 40 percent of the energy it receives from the sun.  With the addition of the second layer, it is now able to convert 7.3 percent of the sun’s energy.

“Using two solar cells with the new interfacial materials in between produces close to two times the energy we originally observed,” said Yang Yang, who is also director of the Nano Renewable Energy Center at the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA. “We anticipate this device will offer new directions for solar cells, including the creation of solar windows on homes and office buildings.”

Chun-Chao Chen, a graduate student in the UCLA Materials Science and Engineering Department who is the paper’s primary author, stated that by using transparent and semi-transparent cells together, they were able to increase the device’s efficiency, and since the materials were processed at low temperatures, they are relatively easy to manufacture.

An added bonus is that the materials can be produced to appear light grey, green or brown, so the device can easily blend with the color and the design features of surfaces.  Also, since the device is transparent, it can be placed on the screen of a smartphone and will not obstruct the user’s view.

If this little device goes to market, I’m pretty sure a lot of smartphone users will be delighted to have this on their screen, as they can charge their device on the go.

Make sure you check out our collection of Smart Devices and Smart Gadgets on Springpad!