2001jan15.

I ran into Kidtrak by accident one day awhile ago. Kidtrak was supposed to be a monitoring service - you clamped a bracelet onto your tender, irreplaceable little shit, and Kidtrak would monitor it 24/7, alerting you of various dangerous conditions that could be conceivably detected by this super-gizmo. Mr. Clumsy falls into a body of water, you're notified. He's in a taxi heading for the Mexican border, you're notified. Etc.

Eventually I found some Kidtrak salesmen. And they weren't selling Kidtrak, they were selling Kidtrak licenses, and those were set up on different levels. Ho ho, it's the old multi-level marketing sca- uh, the legitimate multi-level marketing business. Surely this product does not exist. I saved off what little was available at the kidtrak website. That's about as far as I got, and I forgot about it.

Then I ran into this story at Wired. It's a great read.

I thought you might want to see the Kidtrak Situation Room as it was presented on the now-defunct Kidtrak website. If I remember correctly, this image was presented without commentary. As you can see by the clearly UNDOCTORED photo, Kidtrak at one time was a bustling beehive of activity. Look at all those nodes on what I drunkenly call the "master video screen". Wow.