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PERSONAL TECHNOLOGY/ State of the Art.

Zoombak Tracks Your Dog, Your Car, Even Your Children
By DAVID POGUE
Published: April 22, 2009

Stuart Goldenberg

You have to wonder if anyone in Hollywood has ever actually seen a computer.

Here we are, 30 years into the PC revolution, and computers in the movies still do all kinds of unrealistic things. Text chatters as it spills across the screen. A wrong password produces a blinking ACCESS DENIED message. Confident technicians, when told to "enhance" a security-camera freeze-frame, somehow manage to zoom into a 640-by-480-pixel image about 50 times.

And then there are those tracking dots, those tiny self-adhesive (or skin-implanted) buttons that spies use to follow their targets across the globe. They're such a common plot device, it seems downright unfair that they don't actually exist.

Actually, their great-grandparents do. There is such a thing as a GPS-based locator. Today's consumer models aren't quite as small as those "Mission: Impossible" dots, but otherwise perform the same function. And you don't need a beeping hand-held receiver to track the transmitter, either; a Web browser will do the trick.

Most of these gadgets cost about $500, $50 a month in service charges and a couple of bucks every time you request a location fix. Trucking companies use them, for example, to manage their fleets. But a company called Zoombak has come up with an interesting, consumer-friendly twist: make a transmitter the size of a 1980s pager, price it at $100 and charge $15 a month for unlimited tracking. (The service price drops even more if you pay in advance, and there's currently a two-months-free promotion.)

Zoombak is small enough to attach to a dog's collar.

Now, Zoombak won't get rich catering only to spies; after all, if the movies are any indication, another dozen spies seem to die off during every single mission. Instead, the company suggests that you can install its locator on things like your car (in case it's stolen), your pet's collar, your child's backpack, your older relative's glove compartment, your luggage or the lawn equipment that you lend to your low-life neighbor.

The company daintily avoids mentioning the screamingly obvious, and much more controversial, uses for the Zoombak: secretly tracking the movements of your spouse, children or employees. The Zoombak can certainly be used this way — it works even when it's hidden inside a glove compartment. But you might blow your cover when you retrieve it for charging every three or four days. And you'll have a lot of explaining to do if your subject discovers the thing.

All right then. Suppose you have no ethical qualms, or at least you've managed to squelch them. Here's how it works.

The transmitter itself is 2.9 by 1.7 by 0.8 inches, 2.5 ounces, ruggedly built with a waterproof cover for the charging jack (clearly a nod to nomadic-dog applications). It has a single rubber on-off button — you hold it down for several seconds — and a single blinking green indicator light. (It's so small, in fact, that I actually managed to lose the first unit that Zoombak sent me for review; the battery died before I noticed. To lose a tracking device... how embarrassing is that?)

At Zoombak.com, you can have all kinds of fun. You can click Find Now to see where the transmitter is at the moment, accurate to within a few yards and displayed on a Microsoft Earth map. Frankly, the map is too small — you have to do a good deal of zooming and panning to figure out what you're looking at — but at least it gives you a choice of road map, satellite view or aerial view (photos taken by airplanes from different angles of the same spot).

You can also look at a bread crumb trail of where your locator has been recently, although this information is generally sent to the Web site only once every four hours.

(Alternatively, you can turn on "continuous" mode, which generates five-minute bread crumbs in an hourlong burst.) Successive location reports are indicated by pushpins on the map, cleverly filled by fainter colors as they age.

You can also set up the Zoombak to notify you, by text message or e-mail, when someone tries to turn the thing off, or when the battery dies.

Most intriguingly, you can define up to five "safety zones": addresses or other points with a radius that you specify. You might define a 200-yard circle as OurHome and a two-mile region as CollegeCampus.

Zoombak can be set up to alert you automatically when it has left a preset "safety zone."

Once you've done that, you can set up automatic, free alerts for those locations. When your trackee enters or leaves one of these zones, you get a text message, an e-mail message or both saying, for example, "Chris has arrived at IrresponsibleFriendsHouse."

You can also ping the Zoombak at any time from your cellphone, once you've registered that phone on the Web site. You may feel as if you're doing your taxes all over again — you have to type out your password, a comma, a space and then its name ("1823, Spybot7" or whatever). But in seconds, you get a text message that says something like, "Your Zoombak locator Spybot7 is currently located near 500 West 57th St, New York, NY." It's creepy good.

When all of this works, it's awesome. As long as your wily subject doesn't toss the Zoombak into the back of a passing truck, à la "The DaVinci Code," you're getting pure peace of mind for $15 a month.

So why wouldn't it work? Why are the customer reviews on Amazon all over the map?

First, Zoombak's price, features and reliability have come a long way since its debut a year and a half ago. It used to cost $200, not $100, and there were plenty of technical glitches and missing features at the outset. (There's also a pet version, also $100, which includes a Velcro pouch to attach it to the pooch's collar, and a car-kit version, $150, that includes a cigarette lighter cord as well as a hard-wired trunk-installation kit.)

Second, that safety-zone alert system depends on the Zoombak's 15-minute ping schedule. If your dog runs into a zone and then runs out again within 15 minutes, you won't even know it happened. This also means that whoever kidnaps your child or hot-wires your car has at least a 15-minute head start.

Finally, and most important, once Zoombak determines its location using GPS, it transmits that information to you using the cellular network. Unfortunately, it's T-Mobile's.

As you probably know, T-Mobile's American coverage is not, ahem, blanketlike; huge swaths of this country out West, and far too many smaller swaths everywhere else, have no signal at all. In those areas, the Zoombak falls into radio silence — useless. If I were a car thief or dognapper, I'd set up shop in Montana.

That's the biggest downside, but it's not the only one. For example, although the Zoombak has a 30-day guarantee, you can never change its account information. When old Rover finally arrives at the big kennel in the sky, your Zoombak can't protect another family's deserving critter.

The Web site needs a lot of design help, too — should you click Save or Finish? Locator or Tracking? — and it's incompatible with the Safari Web browser. There have been plenty of complaints online about Zoombak's Costa Rica-based tech support department, too, although Zoombak swears that that's improved recently, and at least it's available 24 hours a day, toll-free. For some people, there's a certain flakiness to those e-mail and text-message alerts, too.

So who knew? There really is such a thing as compact tracking devices, just like the ones in the spy movies. This one is nicely priced, well built and, fortunately, undergoing constant refinement.

Even so, Hollywood still has a ways to go before it attains accuracy in its depiction of real-world technology. Just once, I'd like to see the hero of "Mission: Impossible" lose the villain's trail, swat his forehead and mutter, "Dang that T-Mobile network!"