Students at Tufts University have been able to see the locations of their campus buses, affectionately known as Joeys, on the web for awhile now thanks to the Ublip powered JoeyTracker. Recently they have added an SMS capability as well. Students can send an SMS to joey@sms.tuftslife.com and will get a reply giving them the current location. Or at least it will when the buses start running again in August. I also hear that a mobile phone friendly web page is in the works.

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.

Our team here at Ublip has a lot of experience building GPS tracking applications as well as M2M applications in general. One thing you quickly learn about these type of applications is that they have a lot of moving parts. There is the device and the embedded code that runs on it, there is the provisioning of this device with a wireless carrier, a gateway application to receive data from the device, a database to store the data, and a front end web application to display the data. And believe me, that is a simplified list. Usually people who are thinking about building an M2M application for the first time thing about either the device or the web application and grossly underestimate all the other pieces that must be put in place to have a functioning application end-to-end.

However, for a large subset of M2M applications, everything except the web application could be the same, or at least very similar. And while there are very few teams who have all the skills necessary to build and maintain an M2M application end-to-end, a talented web-development team is comparatively easy to put together.

With that in mind, Ublip is releasing a new product called Foundation which consists of a complete M2M software stack hosted on a dedicated server. You start with a complete turn-key solution from day one. Database, communications middleware, even a functioning web application; it’s all there. You get access to the complete source code of the web application so that you can modify it to meet your needs. We also provide professional services if you would like us to assist you.

We brought our first two Foundation customers online last week. We should have a product page up on our website any day now to make the product launch more official, but don’t hesitate to contact us if you would like more details.

I spend this weekend installing GPS tracking devices on equipment for a new customer of ours in the construction industry, the Jimmy Evans Company. We did the installs in their water trucks and I thought I would share some photos of the installations. Here is a photo of one of the trucks so you know the kind of vehicle I am talking about.

The device and antenna were both easily mounted in inside the dashboard on the passenger side. Here is a photo showing the where the antenna was installed.

And finally here is a photo showing the placement of the actual device.

Everything fit neatly under the relay panel cover. Unfortunately, we didn’t seem to get a photo of the dash after the cover was back in place, but everything fit neatly underneath. This installation was easy and completely discreet. It is completely up to the Jimmy Evans company whether or not to tell the drivers about the device, a decision that we generally support due to our belief in the Hawthorne Effect.

If you’ve ever used Google maps, especially since they’ve added the satellite view, you’ve probably looked up your house. And chances are very good that the location that came up in the map was close to your house, but not quite there. Well, you can now fix that. Google now allows users to edit locations in their maps, as long as the move is less than 200 yards, the change is instant. I already fixed the location of my house, and I encourage you to do the same. As you may know, we use Google maps for our fleet tracking application and rely on Google’s address to lat/long lookup (technically known as geocoding) for things like setting geofences, so the more accurate their database, the better for us. Unfortunately, we do not seem to get the edited data through their service yet, but I’m sure that will change.

Google put together a clever video about this, check it out:

If you interested in seeing what other people are editing, Google also built a recent edits page that is very cool.