New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg should look at this new Kensington product, announced at CES on Wednesday. It is a system called Proximo that Kensington promises will alert users when items like iPhones -- and other, more mundane things like keys -- are lost or stolen.
The Proximo is priced at $60 at Kensington's website. Here's how it's described:
Every 3.5 seconds, a mobile phone is lost or stolen. When you consider the threat to your sensitive data, your downtime and the cost of recovering your phone, you’ll understand exactly why we developed Proximo.
Proximo is an App-enabled proximity monitoring system that lets you track your iPhone, keys and other valuable items at all times. Proximo will alert you with a customizable alarm the moment you move a set distance away from your iPhone. And once you have the Proximo Starter Kit, you can buy additional tags to keep, track and get back up to 5 important items, like your car, hand-bag, and more.
The Proximo starter kit consists of an iPhone app, a key fob for a keychain, and a separate tag to track something else like a backpack or car. Additional tags are available for $25 apiece.
You can also press a button on the fob or tag to help find your missing iPhone via an audible alarm (something that folks use iCloud to do, sans the Kensington system). You can also press a button on the app to trigger an alarm on the fob or tag. The app supports up to five fobs or tags. It even offers a map for GPS-based tracking of devices that are out of range.
That theft data is from 2011, so one can only assume the rate of theft has gone up. Michael Bloomberg would love it: In late December Bloomberg said the New York Police Department had recorded 3,484 more major crimes in 2012 than for the same period in 2011. However, the increase in Apple product thefts was a surprisingly coincidental 3,890.
That number is a sore point for New York. Since the rise in major crimes was less than the rise in iDevice thefts, as Marc La Vorgna, the mayor's press secretary, said:
If you just took away the jump in Apple, we'd be down for the year.
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