Here at ublip, we are fans of Agile Software Development. Although we don’t follow any particular flavor to the letter, we definitely like to work in short iterations with a usable product at the end of each one. Shortly after releasing our Ublip Foundation product it occurred to how perfectly suited this product was for agile development.

When you order a Ublip Foundation Instance and at least one device, you get an end-to-end functioning application on day one. We provide you with all of the source code for the web application. What better starting point is there for the first iteration in an agile project? Usually the first iteration or two of projects that involve as many separate components as an M2M application are difficult because it is so hard to achieve end-to-end functionality without a lot of mocking up or an unusually long iteration in which case you tend to lose a lot of the value of the agile development methodology. But with Ublip Foundation, those problems are gone. The application is not exactly what you want, but it is already working; device, network, carrier, webapp, everything. And it is easily customized in small development iterations to get it to where you want it to be.

If you can’t or don’t want to do the development yourself, Ublip Professional Services is there to do it for you. We can do customizations in small chunks, usually 1 week of work at a time. At the end of each iteration, you get a functioning application and you have no commitment to do any more work. You can even decide to switch to an outside development team if you like. We will, of course, work with you to estimate the total size of the project. And we will do a fixed price contract for everything if that’s how you want it, but we really believe that the iterative approach reduces risk for both sides since it is easy to make adjustments for whatever reason.

I keep running across M2M scenarios that would be amazingly great, except for one problem. But the “one problem” is different for each scenario.

If only the device/radio/sensor were under X dollars…

If only the data communications plan were under X dollars a month…

If only you had GSM coverage in XXX…

If only LEO satellites had a latency under X seconds…

If only we could integrate with SAP/IBM/etc…

If only the application were infinitely configurable in seconds…

If only you could get Costco/Walmart/PetCo/etc. to carry it…

THEN we would have the perfect solution!!

I’m enjoying chanting the Ublip mantra of “easy, easy, easy…” because my toes are sore and bloody from stubbing them against so many rocks and saying “if only…” But to be easy, you have to focus on simple. And to be simple, you have to work with what is, not what would be nice to have.

In a couple of previous posts I used the term “iPhone GPS” and then went on to describe that it’s accomplished through doing cell tower triangulation. Let me state that I’m well aware that there’s no GPS chip inside of the iPhone, but for the purposes of my posts I state “iPhone GPS” meaning that the iPhone can get it’s current position (regardless of whether it uses satellites or not). Okay, with that being said I’d like to share some more of my recent discoveries.

Previously, I stated that the iPhone is not a viable solution for GPS tracking for several reasons. Right now, I’d like to ignore the current limitations of the OS (app can’t be started automatically and run in the background) and focus on retrieving the device’s current location. This is done with limited accurancy, but I’ve explicitly coded our iPhone tracking application to provide the most accurate readings as possible. There’s also a property that can be set to tell the device to report continuously when it moves.

If you’re unaware, we sell GPS tracking products for small fleets and families. All Ublip employees have a fleet tracking device installed in their car and we track each other 24/7 (because we’re geeks like that). This morning as I drove to work I decided to compare the accuracy of the iPhone’s GPS to our fleet tracking device. The Ublip fleet tracking device reports several times a minute while moving and I only let the iPhone report once/minute. This was done manually so there were a couple instances where I missed the mark. When I got to work I logged into our web application and compared my car’s breadcrumbs to those of my iPhone. Here are the results:

The red blip represents our office, where my trip ended. You can see the consistency of reports (evenly spaced) from our fleet tracking device, while the iPhone was somewhat spotty (due to human error). At a quick glance you’ll notice that the breadcrumb trails in both cases are very similar. We’ll be working to continuously improve our iPhone tracking application as well as continue to test against a more accurate and reliable device. With that being said I’m more optimistic about the possibilities of using the iPhone as a GPS tracking device, but this is only one part of the equation. There are still many, many things to figure out.

What do you think? Based on the image above does the iPhone provide enough detail for the types of applications you would use?