We were informed today that the Tufts University JoeyTracker has gone live. Be sure to check out this article that talks about the project and individuals involved:
We posted previously about Tufts engineering students using our GeoRSS feed to build the JoeyTracker application. It’s amazing what a couple of college students can do when they put their minds to it. Using the Ublip Foundation they were able to build the application in a relatively short amount of time. Hats off to the Tufts team for their persistence and hard work. We’ve truly enjoyed working with their team and look forward to bringing more Joeys online.
We often run into examples of how a customer only really needs one small feature to get a great deal of value from a system. We found one example working with a customer that rents mobile generators. There are a number of solutions out there that provide complex monitoring of fuel levels, battery voltage, and so on. But what really provides value is just total runtime. The difference between a problem generator and a reliable one is more about regular maintenance than anything else. Since rental generators are at remote customer sites for long periods of time and tend to go from one customer site to another, keeping track of total engine hours manually is a difficult task and one that is ripe for a simple and inexpensive remote monitoring solution.
Wow. Who woulda thunk it. Sun announced Wednesday it was buying MySQL AB for a cool $1 Billion USD. Not bad for an Open Source database - and it seems to put to rest any doubts people had about the viability of Open Source companies. Of course MySQL is practically an icon in the web world . . . we use it at Ublip of course - as do most savvy web application builders. Overall, we think this kind of deal will continue to promote the use of open, affordable GPS tracking solutions.
Most people are familiar with Second Life, Linden Lab’s virtual world. I’d always wanted to do something interesting in SL but nothing had really piqued my interest — until I heard that they had added support in their scripting language, LSL, for making HTTP calls. With the huge growth of web-based apps, it could easily be said that HTTP is now the client-server protocol of choice for today’s developers — and it got me thinking: If Second Life could talk the same protocol as many of the M2M user interfaces we’ve written, could Second Life become an interface itself? Not only providing a view on real-world data, but controlling it?
Turns out that it can. We decided a Nabaztag would be a great ‘control subject’ and set to work.
We decided to use Second Life not only for control, but also for display — in the video (streaming from a webcam pointed at the bunny), you can see an avatar ‘touching’ (clicking) on the sphere floating next to him, sending a web request over the Internet to a server (the local device) which handles the request and activates the bunny… no different than if we had an ‘On’ button in our M2M webapp! We later extended it to have the sphere light up when the server reported that the bunny was active, providing feedback in both directions.
So… what did we learn from this? Not to be beholden to traditional ideas of what an M2M application should be. Modern web applications in a browser are great, but what if a user wants to see data in Facebook? Or wants their data in a GeoRSS feed? If your teen users spend all their time text-messaging and in MySpace, then your world-class website is worthless to them. You have to give them what they want, and you have to make it fit the way they work.
We were recently contacted by Tufts University about our GPS tracking system. The Tufts student government had been working on a project to track their campus bus (The Joey) and chose Ublip because of our simple approach to GPS tracking. We’ve worked hard to include only the features that customers need within our web-based software. This seemed to resonate with Tufts and they enjoyed our simple and intuitive user interface.
As with most projects, there’s always a requirement or three that fall outside the scope of the current product. While we’d love to implement every feature our customers suggest, we believe in keeping our software bloat-free and adding features that we feel that everyone can benefit from. When Tufts asked for a few features that we considered “custom” we decided they could make use of our GeoRSS feed.
The main feature Tufts wanted was for their students to have access to “The Joey’s” current location without having to login to the Ublip system. While in most cases we strongly advise against this, it made perfect sense for Tufts. So giving them access to our GeoRSS feed allows them to supply HTTP basic auth credentials from their application to ours. Tufts engineering students were then able to consume our GeoRSS feed and create their Joey Tracker application with minimal effort. Check out the video below for a basic overview of the integration.
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