What the Numerex Acquisition of Ublip Means: More of the same, just better

To our customers & partners:

As you know, we announced today that Ublip was acquired by Atlanta, Georgia based Numerex, Inc.
- Here is the official announcement of this transaction
- Also, we’ve posted some thoughts of Ublip’s co-founder and CEO, Jeff Smith about the acquisition

Numerex is one of the most important companies in the entire M2M (Machine to Machine) world. Numerex provides a wide array of secure M2M network services and solutions. The company has almost 700,000 active network connections, serving both large and small businesses – as well as the Federal Government & U.S. Military with its sophisticated Network Operations Center. In addition, Numerex is the first M2M Company in North America to carry ISO 27001 certification - ISO’s highest information security benchmark that ensures data confidentiality, integrity and availability.

To that core strength, Ublip brings to Numerex its Foundation technology that helps jumpstart the development, deployment & customization of M2M and location based solutions – as well as our team of M2M veterans.

Meanwhile, Ublip benefits from:
• The financial backing of a solid, NASDAQ listed public company (Symbol: NMRX), that shares our vision for making it easy to create & implement M2M solutions
• Additional General & Administrative resources (in customer support, operations, accounting, provisioning & shipping, etc.) to help support our rapid growth
• Access to Numerex’s network infrastructure

Ublip will operate as a independent subsidiary of Numerex, and you’ll still be dealing with the same core team members. So that part won’t change. But for customers, the acquisition also means:
• Even greater robustness, reliability and security of our hosting infrastructure
• The ability to purchase airtime (whether GPRS, SMS or Satellite) at extremely competitive rates
• Access to more aggressive pricing on hardware
• A wider range of available services and products
• Additional support personnel available 24 x 7

All of us at Ublip are extremely excited about this partnership. We think the benefit for our customers and partners will be great – yet they will still be working with all the same people who created and built what Ublip has already become. We’re looking forward to continuing to work with you in the coming days, weeks, months & years!

- The entire Ublip Team

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.

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.

We added another interesting customer recently - Jimmy Evans Companies. They are tracking their fleet of heavy construction trucks and equipment. The first units are going on some Water Trucks, Haul Trucks and Skid Steer Bobcats. There are a couple of particularly interesting aspects of this installation:
1) this is the first implementation using our new device grouping feature; so Jimmy Evans can now view different icons for each type of vehicle
2) Jimmy Evans also hopes to use the system’s stop reports to get an idea of actual work time for the Bobcats, i.e., a piece of equipment may stay in the same general area for a couple of weeks, so a breadcrumb really isn’t important. But by using the Stop Reports feature, they can analyze how much time in the day the Bobcat is actually working.

Ublip has signed a new contract with a very interesting start-up called Geoforce ( www.geoforce.net ).  Ublip is developing the production version of their innovative asset tracking/management service - and we will be deploying and hosting it on our Foundation platform.  One thing that’s very interesting about the Geoforce solution is the way it combines different asset tracking technologies and hardware (GPS, RFID, GPRS, Satellite) into a single, easy-to-use web presentation.  Some of the first deployments will be in the oilfield services sector, where companies apparently are constantly looking for their assets - which may be somewhere in their yard - or on a drilling rig somewhere around the world.  Either way, Geoforce’s customers will be able to find their stuff, NOW.