Those of you who use our system for tracking your fleets or other vehicles may have noticed a small change about a week ago. The map on the main “Overview” page that shows all of your devices will now auto-refresh every 30 seconds. If you watch the border of the map near the upper right corner you will notice a message every 30 seconds that says “updating locations” while the latest locations are fetched from our servers and the map is updated without reloading the page. Hopefully this new feature will be useful in the cases where you are watching your vehicles in real-time. We will continue to make enhancements to our product over time, please do not hesitate to contact us with suggestions or criticisms. We are trying to keep our product simple and avoid throwing in lots of useless features that bloat the product and feedback from real customers is a vital part of this process.

For Christmas I received a SPOT Satellite Messenger from my inlaws. Over the Holidays I decided it would be fun to integrate it with our web-based GPS tracking system. This decision was based on the lack of features provided by the SPOT web interface. At Ublip we’re making it simple to integrate any location tracking device into our platform. The integration of SPOT within our system took little time and as you can see from the image below the SPOT tracker is displayed beneath some of our vehicle tracking devices.

I recently let a friend take the SPOT on his ski trip so we could test it with the Ublip platform and more importantly, so he didn’t get lost. If you have a SPOT GPS tracker and would like to see it displayed within the Ublip system please post a comment below. I’m thinking about bringing up an instance of our platform that will allow other SPOTters to use our web-based system. This would allow all you Web 2.0 mashup hackers to access the Ublip GeoRSS feed and have your SPOT display in your own application.

I remember when I was living on a University campus and had to try to decide each day whether I should wait for a shuttle bus or just walk. The problem was, of course, not knowing how long I would have to wait. Well, Ublip is helping Tufts University solve that problem. Soon students will be able to look at a monitor and see exactly how where the shuttles are as well as an estimated time of arrival. Shortly after that, they will be able to get this information using their cell phones.

Here at Ublip, we are big fans of  mashup applications which are applications that combine data from multiple sources. We have just released our first feature to help allow their creation. The most recent location of a device is now available as a secure GeoRSS feed. If you look above the upper right corner of the map on the All Readings report, there is now a GeoRSS icon that is linked to this feed, see the image below:

In the near future, we will be adding additional feeds for multiple devices, geofence violations, stops, etc. If you have any suggestions for feeds or other kinds of API access, contact us.

One of our developers has written a blog post about integrating Ublip feeds with Yahoo Pipes.

The title says it all. You can find a handful of GPS blockers on Google and even a couple on Amazon. The GPS blocker jams signals from satellites and makes it impossible to obtain a GPS fix. This means that your current location can’t be tracked. This can come in quite handy for those that fear “big brother” is watching over them. yet in the Ublip world we believe that adoption of GPS tracking technology will not come from covert or spy tactics, but through the open approach of Track ‘Em and Tell ‘Em. At any rate, if you’ve used one of these devices we’d love to hear how it works.