TekTrak, the mobile iPhone tracking app, shared an interesting story today. The company recently heard of a family in Tokyo, Japan that used the TekTrak app to locate their daughter following the massive 9.0 earthquake that devastated the country on March 11 and later resulted in a tsunami, several more earthquakes, and a nuclear crisis that threatens Chernobyl-level disaster if not remedied quickly.
The family, which has asked to remain anonymous, ran into the same problem most people did after the earthquake hit: the phone networks were jammed. While waiting for their daughter to return home from school, the family found that they couldn’t reach her on her phone, so they went to the Tektrak website to locate their daughter’s whereabouts using the app’s Location History feature. There, they saw the timestamps and saw that their daughter had been in transit since the earthquake hit.
The bus, which the family said normally takes one hour to get from their daughter’s school to her home, ended up taking seven hours, and the family was able to watch their daughter’s movement using the TekTrak app’s Remote Location Tracking feature.
Currently available for the iPhone, the TekTrak app allows users to locate their lost phone and even see where it’s been. The app will soon be enabled with a feature that will let users send messages to the phone (assuming your phone has been picked up by someone who is now schlepping it around). Additionally, in the coming weeks the company will release a TekTrak app for Android, and later this year it will debut apps for the iPad and other devices.
TekTrak is available as both a paid and free app. TekTrak Pro is available in the App Store for $4.99, and hours after launching it made it to the top 20 paid utility apps in the App Store. In December, TekTrak raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from such notable investors as Cyan and Scott Banister, Kima Ventures, Sergey Grishin, Wasabi Ventures, PBWorks, BCITL Ventures, Barney Pell, and Yoni Saban.
