Dell's marketing machine went into overdrive this week care of research they served up about the number of laptops mislaid at airports: 3000 every day across Europe.
Yes travellers are dumb.
It gets worse:
- Business travelers in the U.S., Europe and United Arab Emirates lose or misplace more than 16,000 laptops per week.
- More 3,300 laptops are lost or go missing in the eight largest airports in EMEA each week, and 57% of those that end up in lost and found departments are never reclaimed. London Heathrow has the highest number of laptops lost, missing or stolen in EMEA, with 900 per week.
- 42 percent of EMEA mobile professionals have not backed up the data stored on their laptops, and 55 percent of business travelers have not taken steps to protect their confidential information in the event of them being parted from their laptops.
Oh well. The good news is if you lose it airside you have a very good chance of getting it back, due to the severe shortage of petty thiefs working the airport shopping areas.
Anyway the motive behind the release was to tell everyone about Dell's new support services for laptop users. I was given a couple of answers regarding details not on the release:
- What are the costs of these new services?
They are priced individually. ProSupport Laptop Tracking and
Recovery carries a list price of £15 for one year and £40 for three years of
coverage. The addition of Remote Data Delete for the tracking service
increases it to £20 for 1 year or £55 for three years of coverage. ProSupport
Data Recovery service will sell for £30 for one year and £40 for three years of
coverage.
- Isn't something like Skyhook (using wi-fi locations) the most accurate for
tracking?
While we will not disclose the exact solution we’ve implemented, it does follow a similar idea to the skyhook service, namely capturing all available location signal information (GPS, IP address) to provide authorities with sufficient information to track down the missing system. Here’s a link to the specific statement of work:
So it's interesting that Dell is being a bit secretive on what technology it is using - though maybe for good reasons.
Dell is clearly on the right track with these offerings - it remains to be seen what demand will be like. With margins so tight Dell and the like badly need such service offerings to be viable.
Might be something for the business user, but the average punter usually learns the hard way and forever after learns not to be so daft as to leave his or her laptop lying around.
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