I’m beyond excited to announce that StolenBicycleRegistry.com

has merged with BikeIndex.org ☺

From here on out, the SBR’s new home is: stolen.bikeindex.org — you can read the BikeIndex.org release here.

Words can’t express how excited I am about this! I’ve been running

the SBR — alone — since 2005. Along the way, I’ve registered over 25k+ bikes, recovered a couple thousand, traded countless late-night emails, chased thieves, and fielded both thank you’s and straight-up hate mail. I’ve reveled in every single bike we’ve helped recover.

By combining forces with BikeIndex.org, we get to cover both

pre- and post- theft registration, among other things. Seth Herr of BikeIndex.org gets to keep building out his already amazing service - and I get to concentrate on chasing down stolen bikes — and working with the fantastic people I’ve found along the way who do this, too.

BikeIndex.org’s technology is years ahead of my clunky old website, so I’m elated to have Seth port all the SBR’s bikes into a platform that is

- way more modern and well designed

- extremely mobile friendly

- sporting a full API

- supports advanced geo-location work

… and so on. It’s a huge plus!

Case in point: every single one of the SBR’s 25k+ stolen bikes is now indexed by BikeIndex.org’s fantastic @isitstolen Twitterbot. Which means anyone can tweet a bike’s serial number at @isitstolen to see if they bike they are looking at is reported stolen.

And now - because StolenBicycleRegistry.com and BikeIndex.org are one — this means you can now talk to the largest open database of stolen bikes in the world with a simple Tweet.

That’s just one example. I cannot wait to show you the rest of the amazing things we have in the works!

FWIW: The SBR/BikeIndex mix already recovered a bike — literally while we were still moving the data over — which is a fantastic omen. A huge shout out to Guthrie at Cycle Portland for this. Here’s to many more!☺

-Bryan Hance, 06/15/2014 05:17pm PST, PDX, USA

-stolen.bikeindex.org