Move over mobile tracking software! Now tracking-cum-remote management software is the order of the day!

Approximately 265 million mobile connections and still counting, with 8 to 10 million mobile connections being added every month. Well, that is the Indian mobile market for you. And its growth is not likely to taper off any time soon, either. A report from the Centre for Telecommunications Research (London), India Mobile Market Statistics, 2002-2011, predicts that the total number of connections will reach 600 million by 2011.

Where's my mobile?

With such figures, it is no wonder that the mobile telephony and handset segments are on a roll. But alongside this unprecedented expansion of mobile users is the equally unprecedented rise in the instances of lost or stolen mobile phones. With mobile handsets costing anywhere between Rs 1000 to Rs 45,000, the value of these lost or stolen mobiles is staggering. Add to that the value of damages associated with the misuse of contact details, SMS/MMS records, and photos stored on the handsets, and the loss multiplies several times over. What is worse, since tracking or recovering a lost or stolen mobile is seen as an almost impossible task, most of these instances of cell phone robbery remain unreported. As a result, a parallel trade in second-hand mobile handsets flourishes undeterred by any threat of being caught by the police. It isn't surprising then that the value of this 'industry' is pegged at a few hundred crore rupees.

Given the high cost of upper-end mobile handsets, users are nowadays increasingly installing mobile tracking software on their phones. But this segment has yet to catch on with the general public, mainly because of the limited functionality of available software.