We were recently contacted by Dr. Ben Dubin-Thaler who was interested in making the location of his BioBus publicly available on his website. The BioBus is an old transit bus equipped with lab equipment and mainly used for the study of cells. The BioBus will soon begin its travels around the country and can be tracked in near realtime.

When Ben originally contacted us he wanted a simple solution where the GPS location of the bus could be extracted out of the Ublip system. This was a perfect fit for our Share Where product that makes it easy to integrate the location of a mobile asset directly in a webpage or blog. It’s rather simple and uses our GeoRSS feed to expose the data to the BioBus website.

Ben and his team recently had a successful “Open Bus” this past weekend. Be sure to check out the crawling cell movie on his homepage and we look forward to seeing the BioBus in Texas!

I get a lot of questions from friends and family about Ublip. If you were to ask any of them what Ublip is they would probably label us as a “computer” or “technology” company. There’s no doubt about that, but I’d like to think we’re a bit more specialized. About 10 minutes ago (from the time of this post) you could go to the Ublip homepage and see that we sold a GPS tracking product. The reality is that we’re much, much more than that. Ublip is a company focused on finding elegant solutions to complex problems in the M2M and location space. Most of us are engineers at heart, and in our former lives, we’ve solved complex problems with complex solutions. When Ublip was formed early last year, we vowed to hold true to the KISS principle and check our “engineering inclined” bags at the door.

With that being said, I’d like to introduce you to our new website that does a much better job of defining who we are. The new Ublip site covers the main areas that we, as a company, are focusing on. This can be narrowed down to two areas: our easy to use GPS tracking products and our services division that helps companies find simple solutions to complex problems.

Most people familiar with GPS tracking for vehicles and other mobile assets are familiar with the concept of “geofences”, i.e., setting a defined geographic boundary (usually a radius) - and then sending alerts if the vehicle enters or exits the geofenced area. Most GPS tracking software packages have this capability - including ours at Ublip.

But an often overlooked use of Geofences has nothing to do with protecting against theft of assets - or producing alerts. Geofences - and the reports they can create - can be ALSO be used very effectively to document “proof of performance” for any kind of route based business.

For example, we have a customer in the tow truck business. They have contracts with land owners & managers to routinely check specific properties, and make sure people are not parking illegally on their lots. A lot of these checks take place at night - and the only witness is the driver himself. Sometimes property owners complain that the drivers aren’t checking their location as promised. But who wants to get into a “he said” vs. “he said” argument? There’s a much easier way to know: just set geofences for specific locations - then check reports (daily, weekly, monthly) that recap all the times a given Tow Truck enters that property. If a driver claims he’s checking once a night - the evidence will be right there.

Maybe less of an obit than a testimony to my long friend the Analog Mobile Phone System. In technology, 25 years is a reasonably long life. In 1979 I was a sprite young engineer working on the first microprocessor based 800 mHz trunking and cellular systems for Motorola. I was there when AMPS was born. I helped deliver her. It was a painful delivery. In the summer of 1979 I invented a way to identify where software glitches caused pops and clicks when you talked on radios and cellphones. Then I would debug the code. A 4 bit microprocessor called the COPS 410 followed by an 8 bit micro the 6801/6301. Most of the programming was in assembly and machine code - every nybble helped.

AMPS was enabled by the microprocessor. It provided the technological and cost reduction necessary for mass adoption. Price elasticity. Waltz me around again Matilda.

I remember contemplating starting a Cellular company with Jay Gurley, and Bill Werner. Most entrepreneurs are forced into it. Life at Mother Mo was too good. Perhaps if we would taken the leap this blog would have been posted from an island in the Caribbean (or for me a private Robot Laboratory).

I had dinner with Ed Comer the inventor of the Bellsouth system Cellemetry cellular control channel system the other night. We toasted to AMPS demise. The most successful deployment of CCC arguably was the GM On-Star system. CCC On-Star customers were disabled on Dec 31, 2007. There still are 1 million analog phones used in alarm systems. These will go dark quietly. In the famous words of the prophet Monty Python - “I’m not dead yet, it’s only a flesh wound.” Certainly some carriers will continue to support AMPS (for a short while)- but the efficiency of digital channels - economics - prevail, and, the digitization of the airwaves continues. It is fitting that during our bereavement, we are in the middle of one of the most important spectrum auctions in history - especially for M2M. The 700 MHz spectrum reclaimed from television is up for bid. No one knows who is bidding it up, but it has surpassed the financial threshold for open access - perhaps it is Google.

I never had a Betamax. But with Wal-mart’s announcement last week, Toshiba announced just a few days later that HD-DVD would be abandoned. The market speaks again.

Technology marches forward and backward compatibility is a difficult and sometimes impossible task.

A microsecond of silence for our long friend AMPS.

It is ironic that after a hiatus of 15 years, once again, I am helping rid the world of mosquitoes. In 1992, Larry Chapman worked with me at the Superconducting Supercollider. Larry, like myself, is an idea hamster, problem solver, closet inventor, and electronics geek. Red wine, outdoors, Scientific American, and Circuit Cellar are a strange mix, and the hamster started spinning around west nile, piezoelectric, and entomology. It turns out that only female mosquitoes bite. It is also true that most of the time female mosquitoes don’t prefer the company of male mosquitoes. The masses of male and female wings are different and therefore they flap at different rates. So, as the Chapman-Smith theory goes, if you can make the sound of the vibration of a male mosquito’s wings you won’t get bit. Overcomplicated the problem, d’ya think?

So, after a small production run we were ready to solve the worlds Mosquito issues. We purchased cable channel time on either side of the Final Four tourney in areas of Florida that had not sprayed for mosquitoes. Trouble was, we built devices and bought commercial time and ran out of money before we had made the commercial. So, since we couldn’t afford real cameramen, actors, or editing, I starred in the commercial.

MosquitoNix® employs a specially engineered system that automatically distributes a fine mist of a natural insecticide around the perimeter of your home, yard or other property where you need mosquito control. Ublip will be providing location based services for its fleet, and eventually tank level monitoring for proactive replenishment and maintenance.

Cellular radios and data plans have dropped in price by a factor of 5 in the past few years. ROI can now be measured in weeks. The embedded internet will continue to grow exponentially due to price elasticity. Applications like these provide a great means for both cost reduction and differentiation.

Of course sometimes you get the technology right and miss the market - “skeeter git” vs teen repellent - and sometimes you get the market right and miss the technology. Sometimes you get both and miss the timing. In the end, it is all about execution.

Market + Technology + Timing + Execution = Success.