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.

I have begun investigating OpenDMTP which is “Open Device Monitoring and Tracking Protocol”. I have long been a strong supporter of open standards and protocols even though I haven’t been able to do much to further that cause in the last year or two, so the idea of an open standard for GPS tracking applications is certainly exciting to me. I am currently looking into the possibility of offering a OpenDMTP Foundation product. Don’t hesitate to contact us if this may be of interest to you.

The Ublip Foundation is not a non-profit organization, but the name just seemed to stick as we worked frantically to get the product released. A definition of Foundation goes something like:

The basis on which a thing stands, is founded, or is supported.

That about sums up what we’re working hard to do in the location and M2M space. The process of starting with an idea, identifying a device, configuring/programming the device, writing a gateway to talk to the device over UDP/SMS/TCP/SMTP, creating the database schema, and building the Web application is a complex process. There are so many moving parts and areas of expertise needed to create an end-to-end solution.

What we’ve tried to do is create an architecture built on our infrastructure, that makes it easy to jumpstart your application development. We call it the Foundation. Check it out and feel free to contact us if you’re interested in learning more. We should have the ordering process released VERY soon.

I’ve been doing a considerable amount of hacking with the iPhone SDK, mainly to get the iPhone communicating with our Foundation product. Last night I was trying to display the horizontal accuracy from the iPhone’s CoreLocation API in our Foundation user interface. The horizontal accuracy is the radius of uncertainty of the iPhone’s location (and it’s measured in meters). The uncertainty I was dealing with at the time of development was 1618 meters. I’ve seen the iPhone come close to 100m and even better when connected via WiFi, but more on that later.

As part of our Foundation product we provide some simple JavaScript functions that make it easy to draw geofences on Google Maps. If you’re not familiar with a geofence, it’s basically a virtual boundary you can create to receive a notification if a device moves into or out of it. In most circumstances a circular geofence is used. So I spent an hour trying to understand why I couldn’t get the geofence overlay to display on Google Maps. Here’s my initial screen:

After a considerable amount of time and frustration passed (1 hr to be exact) I decided to zoom nearly all the way out and was surprised to see that I geofenced all of North America. Then I came to the realization that units were keeping me down (m vs mi). I was passing 1618 meters into our function, which was expecting miles. This yielded the following screen:

My geofence was only 1,617 miles off. It turns out that 1618 meters is just a tad bit more than a mile. Finally, I ended up with exactly what I needed:

Ah yes, much better. The image above shows the reading from inside our office building where we’re surrounded by all sorts of windows, walls, cubes, etc. Because of triangulation we’re able to get readings indoors and even underground. Even though the accuracy isn’t all that precise it’s enough to do some really interesting things. If you’d like to get your iPhone hooked up to the Ublip Foundation for development and testing purposes please feel free to comment or drop us a line.

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.