About six weeks ago our MacBook Pro was stolen by a UPS employee during transit. At least that was our suspicion, but evidence points out that it may have never left the UPS store. Either way, I’d rather not lament the fact that it’s gone and last week we decided to have a little fun. UPS is a mammoth company and there’s a chance they’ll never know (or care) about the fact that our MacBook Pro was stolen by a UPS employee. This is a story of how a little tech company took the power into their own hands.

It all starts with another little M2M company in Austin called Critical Wireless. Critical is a partner of ours doing some very interesting things in the remote data acquisition space. They came to us and asked if they could have access to an instance of our off-the-shelf GPS fleet tracking solution for one of their customers. I suggested we ship them a couple of our portable tracking units that are battery operated and about the size of a pager. During our conversation I asked Critical if they would have any objections to leaving the units on during shipment. This would allow them to track the package in realtime as it traveled from Dallas to Austin. Now that’s what I call service!

I mentioned to our packaging department to leave the shipping boxs open so that I could pull out the GPS tracker before I took it into the UPS store. My reasoning was that I would need to give it a clear view of the sky to get a fix. As I drove to the UPS store I called a friend and had him log in to our web-based GPS tracking system. He immediately said to me “I can see you and you’re speeding!”. At this point I was a bit more optimistic that we might get a few readings while the GPS tracker sat boxed in the back of a UPS truck. Here’s a screen shot showing a few blips of my drive to the UPS store:

As I pulled into the UPS store parking lot I took a few photos and got everything ready to go. Here’s a pic of the store (yes this is the same store we shipped the MacBook Pro from) that was going to be “blessed” with our technology:

Here’s a pic of the GPS tracker before I put it in the Ublip product box:

and another with the GPS led on:

I apologize for the quality of these pics as they were taken inside of my car with an iPhone. Here’s another box photo and let me explain the purpose of this pic. Our GPS trackers normally ship inside the nicely designed product box and then in another shipping box. So I’d like to point out that the tracker is already inside two boxes before it gets put in the back of a UPS truck:

I went into the UPS store and dropped off the box to be shipped via ground. As I left the store I started thinking of all the technical obstacles that would prevent us from ever seeing any data in the Ublip system. for one, there are concerns of battery usage since our devices are configured to report several times a minute. The other was the fact that the box would be sitting in the back of a UPS truck, which is essentially a metal container. I did come to later find out that UPS trucks have some sort of window on top of the truck.

On Saturday morning I get an email from Jeff with screen shots of the device traveling down I-35. The amount of data and resolution was incredible. Here’s a screen shot of the truck in Temple, about an hour north of Austin:

After a long, hard day of work the GPS tracker stopped for a little R&R at the UPS facility on Tuscany Way in Austin (at a little after 6:00 PM). You can see the address within the Ublip system labeled as 9012 Tuscany Way, Austin, TX:

After digging around on the UPS site I came to find out that there is indeed a location at this address, but it’s actually 9020 Tuscany Way. Close enough!

The GPS tracker honored the Law of the Sabbath and did no work on Sunday. On Monday morning it began the work week in full effect and arrived at its destination. You can see where the tracker left the Austin facility and made it’s way onto Loop 1:

During the three day process there was tremendous excitement from both the shipping end (Ublip) and the receiving end (Critical Wireless). I never thought our little experiment would actually produce such interesting and accurate data. We have information regarding their routes, speed, stops, and other interesting data points. What’s even more interesting is the fact that UPS had no clue. Our intention was not to do anything mischievous, but to determine if there would be use of our service in this industry as well as find ways to protect ourselves when shipping valuable goods.

The lesson for me is simple. The technology exists to create better customer experiences and provide information to users in realtime. A perfect example is the fact that just today I was waiting the arrival of my belated birthday gift to myself. I went to the UPS site this morning and the shipment was out for delivery at 7:30 AM. I then proceeded to visit the site about 10 times throughout the day until I saw it was delivered at 5:30 PM. Yes I was a tad bit obsessive about this gift. How inefficient.

The other lesson I learned is that we should have used our own product when shipping the MacBook Pro a few weeks ago. How sweet it would have been to analyze the data for any exceptions to the normal shipping routine and possibly find out where the notebook was stolen.

Have you ever been in a situation where you wanted to know the whereabouts of a shipment in realtime? Or did you lose something valuable during the shipping process? We’d love to hear about it.

In 2000, I would have voted Wilson for Best Supporting Actor. You remember Wilson the volleyball from the movie Castaway. In many ways Tom Hanks character reminds me of many of the people that I have met responsible for successfully deploying M2M projects within their organizations. They are castaways. Lonely, on a deserted island, with insurmountable odds. Much to overcome: device, network, gateway, application. A seemingly hodgepodge of items that they could use to improve their situation, and a loyalty to themselves and their vision.

Fred Smith had a cameo on Castaway. I had the opportunity to meet Fred Smith and tour the Fedex facility a couple of weeks ago. What an amazing company. What an amazing guy. Fred Smith is a true pioneer. A visionary. A castaway. A hodgepodge of items that he was able to coddle together to survive years against insurmountable odds. And during all of those trials he kept focused, determined, true to himself, and persevered.

When asked what his most important character attributes were Fred Smith said “Probably conviction. I was convinced that what I was trying to do with my teammates was important and that it would be successful. The opposite side of that coin is persistence. Very rarely have I ever seen any business or major undertaking that goes in a straight line. There’s zigs and zags, victories and defeat, and you have to be propelled by that conviction that what you’re doing is right and what you’re doing is important, and to persevere in it. That’s probably more important than anything else.”

Have you ever felt that way?

“The fundamental principle behind fast cycle or express transportation is that you are substituting your services for other processes.” - Fred Smith

Sound familiar?

M2M is a mechanism for substituting more efficient services for other processes. As each application is proven an individual adoption occurs exponentially.

As M2M deployments become more prevalent and “embedded”. The invisibility of those applications will continue to bring focus on the innovative ones. A casual observer could misinterpret this as a lack of progress, but to the experienced the frontier moves forward.

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.