GadgetTrak has been updated to version 3.0.3, squashing an annoying (and rare) XML formatting bug. This update is recommended for all users, and can be found on the Downloads page.
We’ve released GadgetTrak 3.0.2 today, which squashes a couple of minor bugs.
Before installing the update, remove your tracked laptop from your list at trak.me before installing (be sure to write down your license key before deleting it!).
You can get the updated installer for Mac and Windows on our Downloads page.
GadgetTrak provides the best-of-class features you’ve come to rely on:
GadgetTrak 3 brings a collection of exciting new features and improvements to our award-winning solution:
For current subscribers, there is no charge to add these new features. For the remaining time on your subscription, you can use these new features, starting today. Here’s how:
ActiveTrak CEO Ken Westin was interviewed for Untether.tv about mobile security, covering the greatest features of GadgetTrak’s mobile security products.
Check out the video:
All of us at GadgetTrak are proud to be partnering with 30-Hour Day, an Internet-based telethon benefitting the Oregon Food Bank, the American Red Cross (Oregon Chapters) and p:ear.
This 30-hour livestreaming telethon is hosted by Cami Kaos of Strange Love Live and Rick Turoczy of Silicon Florist.
We’ll will be donating all sales of GadgetTrak to 30-Hour Day during the telethon, so go get your copy and help support the causes!
30-Hour Day runs July 2 & 3. Don’t miss it!
Eric Taub of The New York Times has a good piece on GadgetTrak in today’s Gadgetwise Blog:
GadgetTrak Product Manager Ian Schray was interviewed on KPAM 860’s Bob Miller in the Morning today!
Think about all of the battery-operated, data-storing devices you have… From your MacBook Pro that contains all of your financial documents and pictures of your kids to your BlackBerry with all of your contacts and calendar data, you probably rely more on mobile devices that you ever thought you would.
No, ask yourself… What if you left even one of these on an airplane or had it stolen when you got up to grab a napkin at the coffee shop?
How much is each of these devices worth? $300? $3000? $300,000 when you factor in the data? Priceless?
This blog post isn’t meant to scare you. The point is that we put a lot of faith into our devices, and we rarely put much thought into their security.
In 2008, the Ponemon Institute estimated that 12,000 notebooks were stolen from US airports every week. According to FBI statistics, only 3% of all unprotected lost or stolen computers are ever recovered. That’s 11,640 notebooks lost or stolen and never recovered each week (605,280 per year!). Statistically speaking, we’re probably all going to have a mobile device leave our possession at some point.
As consumers, we can’t do much to prevent mobile device theft. As we become more diligent, the thieves become craftier. The only real protection is to do what we can to track the device once its stolen, and report this info to the police in the hopes that they can recover it.
We created GadgetTrak with the belief that the best way to protect yourself and your devices is to somehow track them once they’ve been stolen. To that end, we’ve worked with law enforcement professionals from all over to figure out the best way to report the data they need to increase the chances that the devices are recovered. From all of this research, GadgetTrak was born.
Each time your device is tracked, it provides valuable location data. This data can then be passed along to police. And since the kind of data we report is exactly what the police need, our recovery rate is well over 95%.
Think about it… Your chances of recovering your notebook go from 3% to over 95% just by installing a relatively inexpensive monitoring application.
Like many of you, we get upset when we read about things like this:
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20100415_Lawyer__Laptops_took_thousands_of_photos.html
and
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/20/us/20brfs-SCHOOLDISTRI_BRF.html
Unfortunately, the actions of a few bad folks can kill the best intentions of others who try to do the right things. This is true in many areas, including mobile device security.
The bottom line is that, if these allegations are true, someone was given access to systems they shouldn’t have. The implementation of the tracking technology is the culprit, not the technology itself.
We should point out that GadgetTrak was not the solution installed on these laptops. Our software can work in similar ways, but we specifically advise a more conservative approach to tracking. For example, we do not support the taking and sending of screenshots, as we feel that this is a violation of privacy and might even be illegal under current wiretap laws.
Unfortunately, when something like this Pennsylvania case happens, all of us who are in this market are held accountable.
We’ve actually turned down requests for organizations who wished to use GadgetTrak technology in this way. We are a rare bird in our industry are we are quite transparent about how our technology works and one of the few that actually lets people test the software out to see how it works and the data it collects. You would be shocked to learn what some other companies have access to on your systems, some use keyloggers, take screenshots etc. We believe that through transparency and allowing people to understand the technology they are in a better position to decide how and where their data goes.
Hopefully, this debate will continue and shed some positive light on a serious problem. We’d love to hear comments on this. Please email us if you would like to voice your opinion or have a question.
Perhaps the worst thing about portable devices is that they’re so easy to carry around, we can barely hang on to them. Asurion, a Kansas City company that insures portable devices, says Americans lose about 60 million cellphones every year. Our laptop computers don’t fare much better. A 2008 study by Ponemon Institute LLC, a research outfit in Traverse City, Mich., calculated that every week, 12,000 laptops are lost or stolen in the nation’s airports alone.
Luckily, some gadgets are smart enough to call for help. A Portland, Ore., company called GadgetTrak has created some smart software to help them do it.
I tested two of their products. One was PC-Trak, for hunting down lost or stolen Windows laptops, which costs $25 a year. There’s also a version for Apple Macintosh laptops, which I didn’t try. The other was GadgetTrak for BlackBerry smartphones, which sells for a one-time price of $25. It is also available for phones that use Microsoft’s Windows Mobile software, but it’s not yet offered for Google Android phones. There’s a free version for Apple’s iPhone, but it lacks some advanced features. Apple famously prevents iPhone applications from running constantly in the background, a limitation that cripples GadgetTrak on the iPhone.
Want your stolen gear back? Don’t call some gung-ho superhero who’s as likely to blow up your small grocery store as he is to catch those perps, call GadgetTrak instead. The little startup company has grown since we last heard of it back in 2007, and is now operating a $25 per year tracking service that has delivered a statistically significant 95 percent success rate on reuniting gadgets with their owners. Available for Mac OS and Windows laptops, as well as mobile phones (BlackBerrys, WinMo, and iPhone) and even removable USB storage, the software’s intelligent enough to remotely activate your webcam and ping the incriminating info back directly to you — no data is sent to GadgetTrak. Check out some recent news coverage of the software and its implementation in local schools after the break.
Over the past few months Portland area schools have been victimized by a number burglaries targeting computer equipment. One of the schools had enough and installed GadgetTrak software on a number of laptops. Within a week the school was broken into again, but this time they stole the wrong laptops. The software was activated and started sending photos of who was using the stolen computer and location, with this information the police were able to work with GadgetTrak to identify the location of the device. The police recovered the laptop and identified key suspects for at least four of the school burglaries that have occured over the past few months.
Another laptop has been recovered thanks to GadgetTrak. A Mac was stolen from our customer Kari Hardre during a home burglary along with jewelry, the GadgetTrak software activated and sent location, network data and images of the thief back.
“They kicked the front door in, so I would invest that $50. It’s an investment well worth it,” said Kari Hardre.
A professor from Georgia State University says his life’s work is gone after his laptop was reportedly stolen which was loaded with years of valuable NASA research. Video courtesy of Fox News.
All online sales revenue today will go to Haiti relief. We have partnered with other software developers through Indie+Relief to donate all Jan. 20 sales to support the relief efforts in Haiti. We will be donating all of today’s sales directly to the Mangrove Fund.
The Mangrove Fund was established in 2007 in order to help existing organizations and people who provide sustainable assistance and support to impoverished Haitian communities. They look for proven track records of success which result from the local relationships and knowledge base necessary to create long-term positive economic benefits within Haitian communities.
The 7.0 earthquake is only the most recent of a string of calamities to strike Haiti. However, it is by far the most devastating. Mangrove will provide ull support to the rescue efforts currently being launched and will be funding several organizations who will be directly involved on the ground, including Vwa Ayiti and entities devoted directly to assisting children living in any one of Haiti’s hundreds of orphanages.
100% of the monies we receive during this campaign will be sent directly to organizations leading the relief and recovery efforts.
We were featured in a great piece by Good Morning America on Christmas Day regarding how to protect the gadgets your received on Christmas Day. GadgetTrak was featured as tip number two:
GadgetTrak uses GPS and WiFi signals to locate your lost electronic and lock it down remotely so a thief cannot use it and police can track it.
Read the full story on Good Morning America
This is actually the second time GadgetTrak has featured on Good Morning America, in a previous episode our technology was also described in more depth with technology corespondent Becky Worley:
GadgetTrak’s MacTrak was featured in its own section of the newly published “MacBook All-in-One For Dummies” by Mark L. Chambers.
Using a Security Application
The unthinkable happens: Your MacBook is stolen while you’re on vacation or on a business trip, and you know that the chances that it will be returned are net to nil. You’ve resigned yourself to replacing it ( and all your data ). But wait! What if I told you taht you might just receive an e-mail message on your desktop computer that tells you Internet ( IP ) address of the thief or perhaps even the address where he or she is staying?
If this scenario sounds a little like a James Bond movie, you’ll be surprised to learn that several tracker applications are available for Mac OS X that will run invisibly on your laptop. A track application can turn your MacBook into a transmitting beacon, broadcasting its current location and all the Internet information it can get to you - allowing you to alert police and apprehend the crook ( who might be in the middle of creating an iPhoto library).
For example, MacTrak from GadgetTrak ( www.gadgettrak.com ) invisibly sends an email to you each time your laptop is connect to the Internet. The e-mail outlines the network environment and physical location of your MacBook, using WiFi positioning. ( Heck your MacBook even takes survveilance photos using its iSight camera and uploads those images to your Flickr account!)
MacTrak costs about $30 per year, which is pocket change for a corporate Road Warrior or design professional who depends on both the laptop and irreplaceable data it contains.
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Another great review for GadgetTrak’s PC-Trak anti-theft software for Windows. Peter Grad of The Record in New Jersey took PC-Trak for a test drive.
I tested the program by switching the activation on. When I turned on the “stolen” laptop, I immediately received e-mail notification that the laptop had been switched on. The notification provided me with a remarkably accurate location of the laptop – latitude and longitude numbers, an approximate street address and a link to a Google map pinpointing to within a few dozen yards the image of my street where the laptop’s Internet connection was detected.Were I using the laptop while moving, map images would be updated periodically.
In addition, Gadget Trak quietly instructed my laptop to snap photos every half hour, capturing the thief – in my test, me — in flagrante delicto, which in this case was basically me feasting on a pint of H*agen-Dazs.
The images were automatically uploaded to Flickr, a free photo-sharing Web site, which can be accessed from anywhere.
So Gadget Trak not only zooms in on your stolen equipment’s location, but it accumulates enough hard data and images to help prosecute a criminal case.
Through the majority of our recoveries one thing I have noticed that has tied them together, they involved a methamphetamine addict. Doing some research it is shocking to learn that nationally police believe that 75-80% of all property crimes are committed by people addicted to methamphetamine, or who profit from addicts. It is not only the device being fenced for quick money or drugs, but also identity theft as the devices sold are full of valuable data. We will be donating $100 to The Meth Project for every theft recovery we make that involves a methamphetamine addict.
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"GadgetTrak is a trademark of ActiveTrak, Inc. "Windows" is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and other countries. "Symbian" and "Symbian OS" based trademarks are brands of Symbian Software Ltd. "Nokia" is a registered trademark of Nokia in the United States and other countries. "Sony Ericsson" is a registered trademark of Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB in the United States and other countries. "Twitter" is a registered trademark of Twitter, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Mac, iSight and the Mac logo are trademarks of Apple, Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. All product titles, publisher names, trademarks, artwork and associated imagery are trademarks, registered trademarks and/or copyright material of the respective owners. All rights reserved.
