Knowing where you are--or where your stuff is--is sometimes a challenge. iTraq wants to help fix that by providing a tag about the size of a credit card that can report its location anywhere in the world.

Existing location tags mostly use Bluetooth, whose range tops out in the hundreds of feet, or GPS, which is more precise but uses a lot of power. iTraq instead splits the difference and relies on cellular radio technology components from GeoTraq. Cellular location tracking is more power-efficient than GPS, but boasts a range of miles. But the heavy lifting is done by iTraq's own server, which can match cell towers' IDs with their locations.

At any given moment, "the device itself doesn't know where it is," iTraq co-founder Roman Isakov told me. "It wakes up, scans, transmits data, and goes to sleep again. On our server, we can read this information from the device and understand what towers it scanned and where it is."