In our never ending quest to find new ways to stay in touch with our customers, Ublip now has a page on the social networking site Facebook. Please visit us there and check back often. We are also working on a Facebook application, but we’re not quite ready to talk about yet.

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.

I’m amazed at how many GPS tracking systems provide only desktop software to view location data and reports. I realize that a lot of companies have been in this game for years where everything used to live on the desktop. Yet they should be scrambling to embrace the Web as a platform and deliver their GPS tracking software through a Web browser. I could go on and on about the benefits, which I’ll list a few here:

- Easy to deploy updates and new features without clunky software to download.
- Easy access to data from anywhere with an internet connection and Web browser.
- Data analysis and usage tracking. This makes it easy to figure out what users are doing and what features are most used.
- Easily provide feeds or create APIs that allow data to be imported into other systems/platforms.
- Easy integration of Web based mapping providers such as Google, Yahoo, MapQuest, and ESRI.

I do realize that many companies have hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in developing bloated desktop software that becomes difficult to migrate to the Web. There are a lot of companies in the GPS tracking space that are suffering from this by being ahead of their time. Yet a lot can be said about keeping software simple so that platform migration doesn’t become a nightmare.

With that being said, at Ublip we’re fully embracing the Web as a platform and building products that are simple to use and delivered through a Web browser. This browser can live on your desktop, mobile phone, refrigerator, or whatever comes next. The first example of this is our simple GPS tracking system for small fleets, but we have many more to come. Please stay tuned and if you have any thoughts regarding our products or products that you’d like to see developed then please get in touch.

Maps are very important to our business here at Ublip, but we are not in the business of producing them. Neither are our direct map providers like Google, at least they are not in the business of producing the databases that actually drive the maps. Almost every map engine on the web is driven by data from either Navteq or TeleAtlas. Creating and maintaining these databases is a massive undertaking, so I don’t want to disparage these companies for sometimes getting things wrong, but they do fairly frequently get things at least a little wrong. Particularly when it comes to geocoding street addresses. Neither of the last two addresses where I have lived were in the database accurately, although my current address is only within about half a block.

When I come across errors like that, I always think that there should be a way that these companies could let their customers help them find and fix the problems. That is, of course, easier said than done. However, I have recently become aware that a small move in this direction has been made. Both Navteq and TeleAtlas do have web-forms that allow users to report errors. It is a fairly manual process, but they will notify you when the error has been fixed. Here are links to the forms:

http://mapfeedback.teleatlas.com

http://mapreporter.navteq.com

There is a project in the works that takes this approach much further. Open Street Maps is a free user editable map of the world. It is not yet good enough for our business, but there was a time when people laughed at the idea that Wikipedia could ever be as accurate as Britannica. We will definitely keep an eye on them.