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.

Although we believe in telling your family or fleet they’re being tracked, there are some instances where our customers prefer to make the use of our GPS tracking system transparent. Recently, one of our customers sent us photos of their discreet installation and I must say that I was highly impressed. I was given permission to share these photos and I hope others can benefit from them.

This Ublip GPS tracker was installed in a Toyota minivan. The first photo below is the compartment houses the in-dash radio. I’ve highlighted the green LED of the GPS tracking device with a larger green dot.

This next photo is a zoomed out view of the GPS tracking device hidden behind a bunch of wires. Again, the green dot highlights the green LED.

This last photo is pretty self-explanatory, but it’s a side view of the radio before it was placed back in the dash.

It’s always exciting to see customers use our product in creative ways. If you have any photos or stories about installing GPS tracking hardware please be sure to post them.

We were recently contacted by Dr. Ben Dubin-Thaler who was interested in making the location of his BioBus publicly available on his website. The BioBus is an old transit bus equipped with lab equipment and mainly used for the study of cells. The BioBus will soon begin its travels around the country and can be tracked in near realtime.

When Ben originally contacted us he wanted a simple solution where the GPS location of the bus could be extracted out of the Ublip system. This was a perfect fit for our Share Where product that makes it easy to integrate the location of a mobile asset directly in a webpage or blog. It’s rather simple and uses our GeoRSS feed to expose the data to the BioBus website.

Ben and his team recently had a successful “Open Bus” this past weekend. Be sure to check out the crawling cell movie on his homepage and we look forward to seeing the BioBus in Texas!

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.

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.