At Ublip we’re always thinking about ways to bring our technology to a Web 2.0 world. One example of this is our Share Where product that has been adopted by several universities and non-profits. Share Where allows publishers to easily share the location of a mobile asset with consumers. One request we get time and time again is the ability to support mobile phones. We do provide limited support for mobile phones using Google’s static maps API, but in some cases it’s not as useful as a mobile client.

Let me introduce you to LightPole. Lightpole allows consumers to subscribe to “channels” and access realtime information about restaurants, shows, history and much more based on their current location. There are a lot of companies trying to solve this problem, which there is a definite demand for. So I fired up my LightPole account and within minutes we were tracking the Tufts Joey from one of our mobile phones here in the office. Since I can’t easily provide a screenshot of LightPole running on our phone I’ll provide a screen of the web app:

This was easily done by plugging in our GeoRSS feed and letting LightPole do the rest of the work. There are many different applications where providing realtime GeoRSS feeds to end users can provide tremendous value. Here are a few I can think of:

- Knowing where the city bus is
- Knowing where the pizza guy is
- Knowing where the air conditioning guy is (do I really need to wait around the house from 12-6?)
- Knowing where the shuttle is because I’m about to miss my plane

What if everything had a GeoRSS feed and I could use LightPole to “see” it on my mobile phone? I’ve stated on several occasions (to the point of being a broken record) that getting data from remote devices is not an easy task and that’s why we created our .

Cnet reports that Keyhole Markup Language (KML) has been accepted as an open standard by the Open Geospatial Consortium. This is the language that Google Earth and Google Maps data is stored in, and can be used to describe anything from a point in 3D space, to polygons, to the shape, style, and color of the lines used to draw them. Although KML has already been used by a number of companies other than Google, this should help it gain even wider acceptance.

If you’re interested in what KML looks like and how to write or consume it, Google Code has some great KML documentation. The spec itself (at least, in the form that will go through the working committee for final approval) is here.

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’ve become a huge fan of Ruby over the past couple of years. In most cases development is much faster using Ruby scripting and Rails. I wanted to post a small example of code that demonstrates how to get GPS data out of the Ublip system via our GeoRSS feed.

The reasons for doing this are plentiful and I can think of a few here:

- A customer needs to automate the process of getting GPS data for their assets out of our system into theirs

- A web application, such as the JoeyTracker, needs to make a web service call to get data out our system into theirs

- A web developer needs to access our GeoRSS feed to build their own mapping feature into their website or blog

Since we implement HTTP basic auth this example will cover passing the proper credentials to our GeoRSS feed.

Here’s the code with a few comments:

Pretty simple code, right? We specify the URL, username, password and then let Ruby’s built-in HTTP class take care of the rest.

Here’s the response from the server:

As you can see this is very similar to a traditional RSS feed, but with the proper GeoRSS encoding included. I won’t go into details about how to parse XML in Ruby, but here’s a great tutorial.

Jeff recently posted about about selling peace of mind. I wanted to post some follow-up thoughts on how we’re focusing on what I’ll call the Peace of Mind User Experience. That sounds like the title to a self-help seminar, but at Ublip we focus a lot of our time on user experience. We create GPS tracking products that are easy to use. At least that’s what our customers tell us.

When it comes to peace of mind, there’s nothing more jarring than stumbling to accomplish a task. Think about the olden days of wanting to listen to a particular song from one of your favorite bands:

1. Open your cassette tape drawer
2. Fumble through the cassettes to find Quiet Riot (maybe you were the exact opposite of me and had your tapes alphabetized)
3. Walk over to your stereo and put the cassette in
4. Press play
5. Fast forward or rewind to “Come on Feel the Noise”
6. Rock out

Nowadays that same experience is simpler when you think about accessing your music library on your iPhone or iPod. The information and experience is much more accessible through today’s technologies. Selling peace of mind isn’t ONLY knowing where your kids or employees are, but making it dead simple to gain access to that information. Everyone that I talk to about GPS tracking realizes the opportunity, and there’s a TON of competition in this space, but we feel our competitive advantage is to solve complex problems through simplicity and elegance.

Let me close with a visual of the Peace of Mind User Experience:

We’re developing different ways of making it easy to get information out of the Ublip GPS tracking system. Our iGoogle widget does two things:

1. Creates peace of mind by knowing an asset’s (kid, nanny, employee, vehicle) location
2. Makes the information super-accessible in an environment that is familiar to the end user

I’d also like to point out that the iGoogle GPS tracking widget is powered by our GeoRSS feed, which is the same feed that powers The Joey Tracker and soon to be launched BioBus.