I recently wrote an article for Wi-Fi Planet looking at The CyberAngel with Wi-Trac, a pompously-named but pretty cool solution that uses Skyhook Wireless' Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS) to pinpoint the location of a stolen laptop. Once the location is determined, CyberAngel Security Solutions then works with local police to get the laptop returned to its rightful owner.

That's been going on in one form or another for a couple of years - what's new is that the two companies proudly announced this week that the system is being used by a wide range of organizations, including Brown University, the U.S. Army Labs, the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles, and Michigan's Sparrow Hospital.

Competitors include Absolute Software and XTool, neither of which has a WPS-type offering yet - they both depend on a phone line or a physical router location to track down a stolen computer.

And Skyhook wireless CEO Ted Morgan says this is just the beginning, "CyberAngel is really the first step - and what you'll see the folks at CyberAngel and others do is start to expand that to things like phones, which people lose all the time - not necessarily even stolen, just left in the cab or something like that," he says.

More here from InformationWeek ... and more here from Government Technology.