A lot of people have asked us what is really special, or different, about the Ublip “Foundation” technology - which we think is a key breakthrough in accelerating the deployment of low-cost M2M and location based applications, such as GPS Tracking & Mobile Equipment monitoring.

I’ll admit that the name isn’t very different or creative - we just couldn’t come up with anything better that implied a simple, easy, fast way to build, deploy and customize applications - that is completely hardware & network agnostic. So Foundation it is!

One thing we haven’t talked about much, though, is how our Foundation’s technology approach not only is simple and effective, it also utilizes many of the most important technologies now emerging. In this article, Gartner highlights the “Top 10 Strategic Technologies of 2008″. And its astonishing to see how many items on this list are inherent in our Foundation, including: ‘virtual’ hosting architecture, composite application & ‘mashup’ creation, web services oriented architecture & what is called the “real world web”.

I think it’s good to know for our corporate customers that working with Ublip helps them take advantage of the most important emerging technologies - without having to make any investment on their part.

We’ve been hard at work trying to make integrating 3rd party devices easy for our customers (and customers to be). The Ublip Foundation now has support for the Orbit One SX1 satellite tracking device and the Xirgo XT2000 GSM tracking device. It’s a great time to be developing M2M applications and I’m always excited to see new devices hit the market. Rest assured, we’ll be working hard to make it easier for you to build end-to-end solutions.

This may seem a bit random for this blog, but Web 2.0 is only as good as the tools that deliver it.

Using Web 2.0 applications may have been viewed through the lens of either Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox (on a Windows machine), but now a third alternative has come forward and I think it has just taken the lead in the “horse race:” It’s Google’s Chrome web browser!

I’ve been noticing that IE and FF have routinely been consuming 150M and even up to 300M on my Vista machine. Both feel clunky and slow.

But I’ve been using Google’s new Chrome browser and I’m shocked how fast and snappy it is — AND how stable, even though it’s still in “Beta.” A quick check of RAM consumption shows it taking only 20-30M of RAM for similar usage scenarios as IE and FF.

Try it yourself and see what you think: http://www.google.com/chrome

It’s an exciting time to be an application developer. Many projects are cropping up that allow end-users to share their location with an application. A recent initiative called Mozilla Geocode was announced and looks very promising. It appears to be using Skyhook’s Wifi positioning technology.

Relating to M2M applications I can think of all sorts of interesting uses for the Geode technology. If you think about most location based M2M applications, there’s generally a mobile asset that is being tracked or monitored. For example, a dispatcher may be interested in sending the nearest cab to a customer. Using Geode a customer could access the cab company’s website and find the cab closest to their current location. There are several industries where optimizing the dispatching process, and putting it the hands of the customer, could prove extremely valuable.

Geode is available as a Firefox plugin, which you can get here. It also uses the implementation of the Geolocation API Specification, which is in its early stages. My first experience with Geode was very positive and had my location within 50m of accuracy. Given that it uses Skyhook’s technology this doesn’t surprise me at all since my previous experience with Loki was very positive. Here’s a sample screen of Geode’s lookup service, which happened almost instantaneously:

At Ublip, our philosophy is to enable application developers to create M2M applications through the use of our Foundation architecture. Foundation makes it easy to get data from remote assets while Geode makes it easy to get an end-user’s location. The combination of the two will lead to some very interesting applications.

SMS and GPRS are certainly not new, but I haven’t seen much discussion comparing/contrasting them, so I thought I would briefly summarize what I know about them here.

Location tracking devices that use one of the various cellular wireless networks will generally employ either SMS, GPRS, or sometimes both for communications.

SMS is best known as the communication approach used by teens around the world for “texting.”

GPRS provides the same IP communications protocols as the Internet on the cellular wireless networks — HTTP, TCP, UDP, etc.

There are some interesting trade-offs between these two communications methods.

SMS has limited message size, no more than about 160 bytes after headers, but this may not be a problem for most applications applications where the device simply sends location and a few other data items. Most service plans charge by the message, favoring infrequent (for example, once-per-day) reporting scenarios. But SMS messaging has more robust coverage and will continue to work on the fringe of rural coverage and other weak-signal scenarios when GPRS will not.

GPRS has many advantages: It supports standard IP protocols, so the same tools and infrastructure that have been built to support the Internet can be used in your GPRS-based solution. Also, lots of people are familiar with these technologies, so the pool of technical talent is large. Since most service plans charge “by the byte,” GPRS is probably a better choice for higher-frequency reporting scenarios (for example, hourly or whenever the device moves a certain distance). Typically, developers have more options to optimize and reduce cost with GPRS than they do with SMS.

The funny thing is that most carriers and most radios support both, but not all service plans and technical support for these options are equal. So, not only must you make the right technical choice based on the inherent merits of SMS and GPRS, you need to be sure your carrier supports your choice well.