Stolen iPhone Led Cops to Thief

This is the kind of publicity tale beyond the reach of even the wealthiest company imaginable - and we're talking Google-like budgets here, folks.

On Monday, David Khan was visiting the downtown San Francisco offices of his public relations agency to demonstrate the capabilities of a product his company has been developing for the last year and a half. An intern was sent out to walk the neighborhood carrying a smartphone loaded with the copy of the software. The meeting participants then settled around a computer to monitor her movements on the screen.

That's when reality met reality television.

"I would call it freakish," recalled Khan, the CEO of Covia Labs.

The first sign that something was amiss came when the blip representing the intern began moving away from office in an unexpected direction. Then it began accelerating at a rapid clip.

"We thought, well, that was interesting," said David Fonkalsrud of the public relations firm KF Communications.

Just as the office was about to call her, the intern walked through the doors in tears, saying that someone on a bike had snuck up behind her and snatched the iPhone she was testing from her hands.

A call went out to 911 but this was a unique situation where Kahn explained that he could track the whereabouts of the thief for the police in real time.

"My adrenaline was pumping," Khan said, recalling the chronology for a reporter.

As they received updates the police were able to apprehend a suspect with the stolen smartphone about 15 minutes later.

The Covia Labs' technology allows military or law enforcement managers to distinguish the real-time positions of their forces in the field. In other words, a good guys, bad guys distinction. Carrying mobile devices loaded with the software, friendly forces automatically transmit their real-time locations to headquarters. The security credentials last only for the duration of the mission.

Khan described the underlying technology as a successor to Java, which came to prominence in the 1990s as a software tool that would run on all devices. But Khan said that promise was never fully realized because Java was designed to ignore the specifics of the underlying hardware devices.

"It turned out that hardware is very different and that's why it didn't succeed," he said. "We've tried to get the equivalent of Java in a way that exposes the underlying hardware."

The tracking technology is still being tested but Khan said it likely will be commercially available toward the end of the year.

And no, this wasn't a reality TV stunt.

"Those people in Colorado showed that you can go to jail for something like that," said Khan. (He was alluding to last summer's "Balloon Boy" stunt in which a Colorado couple made up a story about their 6-year-old son floating off in a runaway balloon to gain publicity.

Still, this was the kind of PR opportunity that seemed too good to be true. Except, of course, for the guy arrested by the cops.