I get a lot of questions from friends and family about Ublip. If you were to ask any of them what Ublip is they would probably label us as a “computer” or “technology” company. There’s no doubt about that, but I’d like to think we’re a bit more specialized. About 10 minutes ago (from the time of this post) you could go to the Ublip homepage and see that we sold a GPS tracking product. The reality is that we’re much, much more than that. Ublip is a company focused on finding elegant solutions to complex problems in the M2M and location space. Most of us are engineers at heart, and in our former lives, we’ve solved complex problems with complex solutions. When Ublip was formed early last year, we vowed to hold true to the KISS principle and check our “engineering inclined” bags at the door.

With that being said, I’d like to introduce you to our new website that does a much better job of defining who we are. The new Ublip site covers the main areas that we, as a company, are focusing on. This can be narrowed down to two areas: our easy to use GPS tracking products and our services division that helps companies find simple solutions to complex problems.

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.

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.

Well this is not what I had originally intended this post for. Let me quickly detail my original plans and then what actually ended up happening. First off, we were trying to ship a 17″ MacBook Pro to a co-worker in Austin. We thought about having a little fun and sending the SPOT Satellite Messenger I received for Christmas along with it. This would allow us to track the package with roughly a location reading every 10 minutes. We’d be able to watch the package as it moved within the Ublip fleet tracking app, though we were very skeptical of it ever sending a reading since it would be indoors (or inside a truck) most of the time. But hey, it was the beginning of a cool experiment.

So here are where things go a bit awry. Here’s a pic of the UPS store I shipped from:

Click the image to see the store’s location. Next I snapped a pic of the MacBook along with the SPOT device:

I originally took this photo with excitement as I’d be able to blog about how we tracked the MacBook all the way to Austin using our location tracking software. Boy was I wrong about that. So I turn on the SPOT and walk into the store. I put the power cable and SPOT in a small box as not to draw attention to the flashing LEDs on the device.

The guy behind the counter (the store manager) asks me where the computer is going and I give him all the details. He weighs it and asks me how much I’d like to insure it for. I’m going to be completely honest here and admit my first mistake. I tell him that I’d like to insure it for $1,000. As you may or may not already know, the 17″ MacBook Pro can easily set you back $3,000. Now let me justify my decision a bit. When asking for insurance I always work under the assumption that I’m having something insured against damage because of mishandling or some sort of accident. I own a PowerBook G4 and the worst damage I ever had with mine was getting the motherboard replaced after I dropped it. This cost a nice $900. Anyway, that was my somewhat weak reasoning.

I’d like to point out the store manager weighs the MacBook before putting it in the box and prints my invoice based on this weight (approx 7 lbs). That doesn’t seem to concern me too much, but when I ask him where’s the box so I can package the MacBook he tells me that they’ll do it behind the counter. Since I’ve insured it they feel more comfortable taking on the responsibility of packaging it themselves, than letting me do it. That seems like a reasonable policy and I’ve done this on several occasions in the past, but never with such an expensive piece of equipment. My second mistake was to trust this in their hands and walk out of the store without ever seeing them package the MacBook. It’s all good, so I drive back to the office to login to our GPS tracking app to see if the SPOT had reported. No report. No big deal as I was very skeptical we’d ever get a report in the first place.

The next day I’m at dinner with a friend and I get a call from Austin. Austin was the recipient of the package and he lives in Austin. Austin says to me, “Hey, did you forget to put the MacBook in the box?” This kind of throws me for a loop and I say to him “What in the word are you talking about?” He then proceeds to tell me that there’s an empty box with the SPOT tracker inside, but nothing else. My first reaction was of complete astonishment. So we talk through the situation some more and I try not to presume the worst, that the MacBook had been stolen. So I ask Austin to snap some pics and send them to me.

This first pic is of the box after Austin opened it. The box looked perfectly sealed and everything, just weighed about 7lbs less!

This pic is of the bubble wrap the MacBook was apparently in:

Here’s a pic of the small box I packed the SPOT device and the power cable in. This was inside the big box with the MacBook. As you can see, there’s no power cable:

And last but not least, a random zip lock bag (that’s right kids, a zip lock bag!) that Austin found inside the box:

A rather humorous point I’d like to make is that the SPOT tracker was still blinking when it arrived at Austin’s doorstep. I had put it in continuous tracking mode before I shipped it from the UPS store in Dallas. That means some idiot had to open the box, pull out the power supply, while a GPS tracker was sitting right there next to it. If ONLY the friggin’ SPOT would have reported JUST THAT ONE TIME!

Our other theory is that since I was such an idiot and left the store without ever watching the MacBook get boxed up is that it never made it into the box. When I called the store manager the next day he sounded very nonchalant about the whole situation and mentioned that this is somewhat common during the Holiday season. I was baffled to hear this and it blows my mind that our MacBook was stolen by a UPS employee. When I went into the store just to get clarification on the situation the lady was very offended by some of the questions I asked such as:

- Do you have confirmation that the computer actually left the store?

- Is the weight of the package monitored at each check point?

- Will we be reimbursed for the full cost of the computer?

At any rate, I thought I had every right to do my own sort of investigation since a $3,000 piece of hardware just turned up missing. I asked the store manager what comes next and he informed me they would tell UPS of the situation. From my understanding UPS stores are independently owned and operated.

After UPS was notified they would send a fraud investigator to Austin’s house to pick up the package and inspect it. We were informed that if everything goes well we should get our $1,000 claim check. When I heard this I almost flipped my lid (hence my reference to mistake #1 above). They’re going to reimburse us a measly $1,000 because one of UPS’ employees stole our MacBook? When buying insurance never in a million years did I think to insure it against theft from the company I was shipping with.

I really am not interested in pointing the finger because I do realize mistakes happen. But the least UPS could do is refund us the cost of the MacBook. At the time of this post we’re waiting to hear back from UPS regarding our $1,000 insurance check, but I’m kinda hoping this post raises a little more awareness within their organization. I will post an update once I hear from UPS.

Here’s what I did learn in this entire process:

- If you ship high-value goods with UPS I would recommend insuring them for their total value. It sucks that you may need to insure them for their retail value, not what they’re currently worth.

- The SPOT Satellite Messenger is not a reliable device to do package tracking with. That’s not its intended purpose, but I thought it would be a cool experiment.

- Always watch the person at the front package your item or do it yourself before you get into the store.

- UPS really needs to consider a GPS tracking solution for high-value goods. I know a great company that could help them with this (check out www.ublip.com - my shameless plug).

I would like to ask anyone that reads this article to please share their thoughts on the following:

- From the information I’ve shared, where do you think our MacBook is? Do you think it’s with someone at the UPS store or possibly stolen by a UPS driver?

- Have you ever experienced a similar situation?

- Do you think UPS should refund us for the full cost of the MacBook?

I’d love to hear your thoughts and hope you enjoyed the rather eventful post. I can say that it’s been a very eventful last week and everyone that hears this story stares at me in disbelief.