Alec Saunders SquawkBox

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Everyone has, at one time or another, lost a piece of consumer electronics like a cell phone, or an iPod.  There has really been no easy way to find it and recover, until now.  Today we talked with YouGetItBack CEO Frank Hannigan about their solution for these problems.

YouGetItBack solves these problems in two ways:

1. They allow you to purchase and tag your electronics.  When a device is lost, the finder of that device simply calls the number on the tag, and arrangements are made to return it.
2. The allow you to control access to the data on your device.  Logging into their website, one can lock down the lost device, recover data like address books and phone numbers from the device, and even tap into the onboard GPS (if present) to have the device tell you where it can be found.

As Frank Hannigan said on the call today, billions of things are lost every year.  It’s a problem we can all relate to, and YouGetItBack has developed an easy solution.  Available globally, on their web site, for between $10 and $20 per year per device.

On the call: Frank Hannigan, Jim Courtney, Adam Somer, Bill Volk, Sheryl Breuker, Mike Pruyn, and Jonathan Jensen.

 

 Squawk Box August 6 [34:38m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Got a question you’ve just been dying to ask the Wordpress development team?  Well, here’s your chance.  Wordpress founding developer Matt Mullenweg will be at WordCamp 2008 in Toronto.  Interviewer Roz Allen is looking for some help in developing a line of questioning.  Head over to the therozblog.com and post your questions to her comment stream.

Jonathan Greene wrote yesterday about why he thinks a Zune / Nokia match-up makes sense.   Here’s a little more fuel for the rumour mill on this.  The Twango team (Serena Glover and her partners) were acquired by Nokia, and branded Share on Ovi.  They are ex-Microsoft employees and located in Seattle.  And how about Lenn Pryor — the Nokia VP in charge of applications and software for Series 60 handsets?  He’s another ex-Microsoft employee.

Perhaps it’s not as far-fetched as it sounds… or perhaps it’s August and everyone’s at the beach leaving folks like us to idly speculate about possible match-ups in the tech industry.

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For the last few days I’ve been scratching my head on a particularly knotty problem — configuring iPhone 3G to access our corporate VPN over 3G wireless.  Rogers, bless their hearts, hasn’t made this easy.  By reading the marvelous Howard Forums, visiting the Apple store in Toronto for help, and checking Apple’s support boards, I’ve managed to make it work with these three steps:

1. You will need the VPN option attached to your data account.  Phone Rogers, speak to a CSR, and ask them to add this option.  This allows you to access the Rogers vpn.com APN.  You need this because internet.com, the standard iPhone APN, is behind a NAT.

2. Next you need to change the APN from internet.com to vpn.com.  There is no option to do this on iPhone, because Rogers has disabled it.  Nevertheless, you can visit http://www.unlockit.co.nz which is a web site that will send you a new profile that you can install on your device.  Use APN vpn.com, username wapuser1 and password wap.

3. set up your VPN.  You will need user names and passwords from whomever manages this stuff at your organization. AND you will need to set the “send all data” setting to off.

Now for the bad news.  Having done this, you may find (as I have) that you’re no longer able to set up a VPN connection over WiFi.