A Night of Drinking Leads to a Hangover, a Missing Credit Card and an App

There are all kinds of places to be inspired.

Fernando Pizarro found his while nursing a hangover at an International House of Pancakes. The former Yahoo business development manager was there this past January, struggling to find his credit card after a night of drinking with other entrepreneurs at a Palo Alto bar.

Finishing up his Rooty Tooty, Fresh ‘n Fruity, it slowly dawned on Pizarro what had happened. He’d been with a bunch of classmates from the Founder Institute and had left his credit card–and an open tab–at Antonio’s Nut House–a bar frequented by techies, including Marc Zuckerberg. Why, he thought, didn’t he have an app on his iPhone to remind him to retrieve his credit card before he exited the bar?

“I thought, there has to be something that would prevent me from leaving the bar,” he said.

But, search as he might, Pizarro couldn’t find a program that would remind you to do something before you leave a certain place. So, he had one built.

The result is Remember It App, which has just hit Apple’s app store. The 99-cent program is remarkably simple. The user sets a distance–from 50 feet to 500 feet–and when the iPhone goes that far from its present location, an alarm sounds. It’s essentially the digital equivalent of tying a string around one’s finger.

There are a couple downsides. First, the app only sounds an alarm, so one does have to recall what it was they wanted to do before leaving the place. Also, it naturally won’t work if the iPhone itself is the thing one leaves behind.

But Pizarro, who worked at Yahoo in Southeast Asia before quitting in 2008 to travel the world, hopes Remember It will help others avoid slip-ups similar to his. He also hopes the app will help fund his bigger project, a social video creation app.

“It requires cash and for the moment I’m bootstrapping,” Pizarro said.