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.