GadgetTrak at work, locating a stolen device

Let's kick things off with GadgetTrak (Mac, PC, IOS, Blackberry, Android - $4-35 per year) and the now omnipresent smartphone. The GPS feature on those little guys can now be the key to retrieving them after they slip out of your mitts. According to GadgetTrak, Wi-Fi positioning and mobile network towers are the cornerstone of their app's functionality. With that little piece of information they can pinpoint the phone's location "to within a few metres". Granted, you've got to hope the sneak who made off with your phone has it on, has enabled GPS and stays put long enough for you to get the cops on their tail.

The mystery man photographed by Kaufman's stolen MacBook, using app Hidden

A pretty perfect example of this kind of software in action broke on the news last week, when American Joshua Kaufman recovered his MacBook using Hidden (Macs only - $15 per year). This clever little app seemed to work so well that most people wrote off Kaufman's This Guy Has My MacBook blog as a marketing scam. Essentially, once his laptop had gone missing he activated the app and it proceeded to photograph whomever happened to be using the Mac every eight minutes (that guy, above), email those photos back to Kaufman and narrow down its own location.

Again, an internet connection and spot of weird (and likely frustrating) voyeurism helped Kaufman eventually gain enough press and media recognition for local Oakland police to believe the case was worth pursuing. Similarly, Erick Lounsbury paid a useful $49 to have his MacBook recovered when it was stolen from his vacant home.

Police officer snapped by Lounsbury's laptop after Orbicule tracked it down

Back from a holiday in Las Vegas, Lounsbury activated Orbicule's Undercover (Mac & IOS - $49) and began the tracking process. An internet connection was all the app needed to email and text him details of the laptop's location; it too photographed whomever happened to be sat in front of the screen. Luckily for him, that was soon a policeman (pictured) after a tense few weeks of waiting.

Running along similar lines, but for $49 less, is open source software Prey (Mac & PC - free), which gives users a host of customised settings for optimum thief-busting.

A shot of Orbicule in action, honing in on a missing laptop's location

Finally, Stolen Camera Finder (free) can track down a stolen digital camera using the serial numbers of specific models. This one's pretty great, as you generally just need to drag and drop photos you'd taken with the camera in question onto the software site and it kicks into gear. Camera Finder scours the internet for other photos taken with the same camera (mostly using Flickr and a Chrome extension) then collates them for you.

Its creator Matt Burns tells us he's been 'contacted by various police departments around the world who are now using the site to track thieves' and is looking to expand its reach using digital 'fingerprints' created by each camera's pixel brightness. Digital detectives are go.