We get lots of questions from people that find about Prey only after their devices go missing, and we hate to tell them we can’t help them. So we decided to gather a few tips that may help locate a missing device without any anti-theft protection. There’s always hope!

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We’re excited to share with you one of our biggest secrets. For the last few months we’ve been thinking about how to make Prey bolder and tougher than Bruce Lee combined with Rambo and Terminator (from the first movie). It’s taken a while to put everything in place — almost everything has been redesigned and rewritten, actually — but we’re finally approaching Limit Break.

However, there’s still one piece of the puzzle that’s missing, and that’s you.

Before releasing this “New Everything” we’ve been breaking our backs with, we want to make sure every bit of it works as expected and there are no loose bolts. That’s why we decided to launch a private beta in a few weeks so we can get your feedback to see if there’s anything missing or that can be improved.

And yes, we’re not kidding about the “New Everything”. Probably most of what you’ve seen of Prey will be different in one way or another — for the better, of course. :)

So, are you up for it? Registration is now open for the brave men and women willing to take a part in this adventure. We’ll send the invites in a few weeks with all the info you’ll need to get early access to the new Prey, with all its new set of features.

Update: 2013-02-21

Signups for the Prey beta will be closed tomorrow February 23, so hurry up!

We’re still celebrating the world didn’t end last year, and to show you how happy we are, here’s our first 2013 present for you: Prey for Android now takes pictures of whoever steals your device. From now on, it doesn’t matter anymore if your desktop, laptop, tablet or phone gets stolen—as long as there’s a built-in camera on your device, you’ll see the bad guys’ faces.

But that’s not all the news! Prey for Android got much more handsome, it also features an Uninstallation Lock, and now gathers hardware information to help you identify your lost device in case it gets found. Some bugs were also fixed.

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Everyone knows it — iOS is a very restrictive platform, and doesn’t make it easy to build an app like Prey. After releasing our iPhone and iPad client, we explained how we managed to make Prey work on it, despite the restrictions imposed by the Cupertino guys.

We then decided to release On-Demand for all users to reduce battery consumption and to simplify activation on mobiles. But still, many questions have arised about how this affects activation and why, on some cases, reports simply don’t work.

So we thought it was a good time to wrap up all this content, and make a brief guide with all what you need to know about Prey for iOS.

Shall we?

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So you’re all excited about your gorgeous, brand-new phone. What is it? An Android, iPhone, Blackberry or a Windows Phone? No matter what OS, vendor or carrier that you bought it from, there are things you should definitely do if you want to protect and keep your new device clean.
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A few days ago we pushed version 0.5.9, which is a big jump from good-old 0.5.3. While this new client includes a ton of new things, the most important being the fix for the geolocation issue (aka. “no map on reports”), plus duplicate device detection, full SSL support with certificate verification, support for OS X’s network auto-connect, a better configurator for Linux and improved offline actions. Whew!

You can find and download the new client from our downloads section. For those of you interested in the small print, here’s the full changelog.

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After almost four years using Google Groups, we’re moving our community forums over to answers.preyproject.com.

As a mailing list, Google Groups works pretty well, but unfortunately it doesn’t have a way of organizing content, so it makes it hard to find what’s useful and that usually means duplicate duplicate topics.

Annoying, isn’t it?

To tackle these problems we built a new, simple forum platform from scratch with a clean user interface, focused on making it easy to find relevant content. All of the data has been migrated — and most of it categorized — so you can update your bookmarks and let us know what you think.

Here’s the introductory post: Welcome to the new support forum for Prey.

Good news everyone! You can now use Prey On-Demand on your iPhone, iPad or your Android phone or tablet whether you have a Pro account or not. This means more juice for your iPhone and iPad, and more love for Android tablet owners.

Keep on reading if you don’t know what the hell we’re talking about.

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Last friday we were invited to a special event in Chile’s Presidential Palace. The man in charge, Sebastián Piñera — aka. the President — along with the Minister of Economy, Pablo Longueira, granted three awards to companies considered outstanding from a poll of over fifteen hundred.

Turns out we were one of them.

Piñera — whom you might recall from the famous episode of the miners being rescued — gave us an award for being the most innovative company of the year.

Yup, that’s right! Keep on reading if you want to see the team shaking hands with the big guy.

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As you might have seen, we get lots of recovery stories from our users. They tell us how their stuff got stolen and how they got it back, and in some cases, how they managed to do this even from a different country.

So we decided to do a small research and list the top five places where laptops get stolen, according to the hundreds of stories we’ve received so far. This might reduce the chance of your laptop from being stolen, so go grab a cup of coffee and read this carefully.

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