Lost your cellphone? Find where it is and who using i t...

ndia Expensive cellphones are disappearing around the world every minute, snatched out of hands, picked from pockets, forgotten in taxis. But now, for the amateur detectives among us, there is software that, for $8, can tell you who stole your phone and help you hunt them down.

Until recently, all you could do was ensure that no one else used the phone by reporting its serial number and blocking it, either through your operator or a site like www.immobilise.com.There is also special software, used mostly by big companies and governments, to erase data remotely on phones, like addresses, e-mail messages, diary entries or photographs. The London-based software firm mFormation sells such a service to the US Congress, among other clients, lest a senator’s stolen Blackberry place government secrets in terrorist hands (www.mformation.com).

Perhaps to discourage people from taking the law into their own hands, few companies have focused on helping customers recover the stolen phones themselves.
But Micro Technologies, a software firm based near Mumbai, has done just that. For $8, you can download the Lost Mobile Tracking Solution from www.microtechnologies.net to your phone. The company supports a raft of advanced Nokia phones, as well as two from Samsung and two from Panasonic, according to its web site.

Think of the software as a benign Trojan horse. If the phone is stolen, the thief, or the unsuspecting new owner, probably will insert a new Subscriber Identity Module, or SIM card. That switch will prompt the software to send you e-mail and text messages telling you the thief's new number and approximate location.

“You can call this guy and say, ‘Boss, you have got my mobile. I know your number. Can you please return it?’” said Mukund Gupta, Micro’s chief of operations. Micro has sold more than 10,000 copies of the software over its Web site and at least 25,000 more through distributors, Gupta said. It has customers in India as well as in Britain, continental Europe, Pakistan, Dubai and elsewhere. “This is absolutely new,” said Emma Mohr-McClune, a senior analyst at the London-based firm Current Analysis. “I’m looking at this every day, and I've never heard of physical restoration of the handset. That would be a clear, competitive, unique selling point.”

Later, Mohr-McClune called a reporter back to say she had spoken with people at Microsoft, Nokia and Research In Motion, which makes the Blackberry line of e-mail phones. All were surprised to hear of the new technology, she said. But installing the software seems somewhat complicated, and using it could be even more so. Once you find the thief's number, you still have to nab him or her, though some do return phones voluntarily when contacted, said P. Sekhar, the Micro Technologies chief executive. Failing that, if the police are unwilling to perform a sting operation on your behalf, you would have to devise your own trap, at your own risk.

What is more, stolen phones often end up in faraway places - stolen British phones reached 46 countries from Peru to Australia, according to a 2005 British government study. “For the users, it’s not that useful,” said Elsa Lion, an analyst in London for Ovum, an industry consultancy. “If you know your phone is in Marrakesh, what are you going to do? You're going to get on a plane?”

Even if a phone remains within the country, she said, confrontation is not everyone’s forte. “I’m sure there will be people quite happy to get the number, get in the car and go find the guy,” she said, adding, “they need to develop applications for this that avoid using violence.” Mark Edwards, chief executive of mFormation, which sells its services to operators from Telefónica in South America to Vodafone in Britain, said his firm could also find a stolen phone's new number. But it chooses not to focus on that product. For corporate users, he said, protecting data is far more important than recovering stolen devices. Edwards said the soundest estimates suggested that locking, erasing and otherwise protecting smart- phone data would be a $1 billion business globally by 2010.

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