Track Or Treat

The busy season for companies selling child tracking services and devices? Right now.

"We get a lot of interest for our smaller trackers for tracking children around back-to-school time, and parents tend to deploy them around Halloween, as well," said Todd Morris, CEO of BrickHouse Security, a distributor of audio alert units, and GPS and RFID tracking devices for children.

Morris advises that parents who do deploy a tracking device shouldn't tell their young children about it. "We have trackers with panic buttons on them, but with kids that's really the last thing you want, to have them fumbling around with the device and calling 911. More importantly, if the child knows the device is there, they may draw attention to it and then the people you don't want to know about it will know it's there," Morris said.

Different situations call for different tracking solutions, Morris added. For very young children, BrickHouse Security offers a small audio alert device that attaches to a child's shoe or clothing. Set in a pink or brown plastic casing shaped like a teddy bear, the device emits an intermittent chirping sound when the child's parent clicks a keychain transmitter. The company's RFID trackers can locate missing children within a radius of 300 to 600 feet.

BrickHouse Security, the North American distributor of Lightning GPS products, also sells tracking solutions that tie into Google Earth and a GPS logging device that plays back all the places a tracking unit has been over a particular time frame.

The New York-based distributor has a small channel of dedicated resellers, but Morris said most solution providers like to work out joint sales agreements with his company on a case-by-case basis.

"We work with a lot of solution providers, doing joint sales calls, where we'll even say we're with their company in the GPS department," he said. "It's an emerging technology, so there's not a lot of room for a million companies doing just GPS."

While tracking and mapping technology has made the most inroads in the commercial distribution and delivery space, recent changes in the pricing landscape for retail devices have made such units more appealing to parents, Morris said.

"Two years ago, these sorts of devices sold for $1,500 and were pretty much limited to high-profile executives. But now we're down to the $500 level, so parents are starting to pay attention," he said.

Telecoms like Sprint and Verizon are also involved in this market, offering subscribers GPS-tracking services tied into a child's cell phone. Verizon's Chaperone service, for example, locates the child's phone via a dashboard parents can access on a computer or another Verizon wireless cell phone, said Dale Beasley, associate director of location-based services at the New York-based carrier.

"Clearly these are the times when parents are concerned about where their children are, certainly in the back-to-school time frame and around Halloween, we see additional demand for the Chaperone service," Beasley said.