Saturday, April 23, 2005
America's Lost and Founds Booming
People are losing more and more things because they are lugging so many additional gadgets and communications devices, and promptly misplacing them in airplanes and airports, hotel rooms, restaurants, cabs and rented cars.
A study conducted by Pointsec Mobile Technologies, a mobile-data protection software company in Chicago, found that the number of laptops abandoned in one London cab company's taxis rose 71 percent in the second half of last year from the same period in 2001, while the number of personal digital assistants left behind shot up 350 percent. One cab company in Chicago had the highest numbers: In the final six months of 2004, it found, in its 113 taxis, 387 mobile phones, 97 PDAs and Pocket PCs and 20 laptops. It did not have comparable 2001 data. Extrapolating from those numbers, Pointsec calculated that 85,600 mobile phones, 21,500 PDAs/Pocket PCs, and 4,425 laptops disappeared into Chicago's 25,000 cabs in those six months.
From the International Herald Tribune