Tracking

The National Bike Registry tells us that thousands of bikes are stolen every day in the United States alone, estimating a cost of around US$200 million per year. A stolen bike can take hundreds or thousands of dollars out of your pocket, leave you without a means of transit and turn into a frustrating, angering experience. The SpyBike Covert Bicycle GPS Tracker protects you from theft by tracking down your bike.  Read More

A new law came into effect in the U.K. this past weekend which requires U.K.-based websites to receive consent from visitors before using cookies to store tracking information about them. Though the law originally called for visitors to explicitly opt-in with the use of a checkbox or similar method, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), an independent privacy watchdog, backpedaled just 48 hours before the law was to come into force and watered down the legislation to allow "implied consent" - in other words, websites can assume users have already consented to the use of cookies.  Read More

U.S. Publications Inc says that a study by the U.S. Department of Justice has revealed that sex offenders are four times more likely to re-offend than other convicted criminals, and that 60% of convicted sex offenders are out on parole or probation. Playing on the fear that there could well be just such a person living secretly in your neighborhood, the company has announced a new app that's said to be capable of pointing out the location of such undesirables within a 40 mile (64 km) radius of a given area. The Criminal Tracker app doesn't limit its results to sex offenders, however, as the company's database is claimed to be the most comprehensive National Criminal Index available.  Read More

A prototype of the new Lockheed Martin Space Fence radar system is currently tracking orbiting space objects smaller than was ever possible - down to about a centimeter in size. In doing so, it met a key contract requirement during a series of demonstration events by proving it could detect and track such small objects.  Read More

Last year, we told you about a smartphone-based system that can be used to find your missing stuff, known as BiKN. It consists of an electronic case that the phone slides into, which tracks the whereabouts of paired radio frequency tags that the user attaches to their car keys, purse, children – you name it. The phone displays the location of the sought items, or can sound an alarm if one of them gets too far away. Now, it looks like BiKN might have some competition, in the form of the similar-but-different U Grok It.  Read More

We're not aware of lost skis being a huge problem, but the folks at Washington state-based company Ski Retriever have obviously faced that problem often enough to go to the trouble of developing a solution. The Ski Retriever is a homing system for lost skis that involves attaching homing tabs to your skis or snowboard and using the radio-based, handheld device to track them down should you misplace them. Less time spent digging fruitlessly through the snow means more time skiing the mountain.  Read More

Pico projectors might be able to turn any old surface into a display – with varying results of course – but can they turn any old surface into in interactive display and everyday objects into a remote? No? Well, with LightBeam they can. Developed by a team at Germany’s Technische Universität Darmstadt, LightBeam pairs a pico projector with a depth-sensing camera to provide some Kinect style interactive control to projected presentations.  Read More

Even if you think you're pretty handy with a chisel, often all it takes is one wrong angle or strike of the hammer to ruin an entire sculpting project. MIT's media lab has a solution - the FreeD is a handheld smart milling device that gives the artist creative control, but won't let you totally screw up your project with one wrong move.  Read More

Radio frequency identification (RFID) tags are definitely a handy way of tracking shipments. Instead of simply crossing their fingers and hoping for the best, importers and exporters can check the location and condition of shipped items in real time, by remotely accessing the data being transmitted by RFID tags attached to those items. Unfortunately, many such tags don't work on metal objects such as shipping containers or oil drums, as the metal interferes with the functioning of the tags' antennas. A new tag developed at North Dakota State University gets around that limitation, however - it uses the metal object as its antenna.  Read More