This post is mainly for my friends, family, and associates to understand what the acquisition of Ublip by Numerex means, in non-technical terms. If you ask 90% of the people in my life what it is I do for a living, they’ll tell you I work with computers. While this is true, I’d like to paint a more colorful picture. On the retail side of our business we sell GPS tracking products that allow consumers and businesses to keep track of their most important assets. This could be a loved one, a vehicle, a machine, or even a campus bus. Ublip is all about simplicity. If you sit in any product or design discussion you’ll hear us say “simple is better”, “less is more”, “avoid the kitchen sink” and so on. While this seems commonplace, I’ve found simplicity to be the exception, not the rule, in our market. If you take a look at some of our competition you’ll find that they focus on a complex sell where “more is more”. While some organizations may think they need complex products, we’ve found that most do not. Most customers don’t have the time to learn yet another software program.

95% of our company are technologists so don’t think for a minute it was easy for a bunch of engineers to get together and say “Hey! Let’s build something simple!” But that’s what we did and I’d like to think the message comes through in our brand, our software, our customer support, and our culture. Collectively, we’ve spent several decades in the machine to machine (M2M) space and have been involved with building complex software. Complex software and endless product release cycles have caused us to lose many deals in the past. But alas, we’ve focused on what we feel are the essential components of web-based tracking applications and continue to incrementally improve the product based on customer feedback.

The other side of our business is all about enabling the rapid creation of M2M applications. Let’s take tracking a remote asset, such as a loved one’s car, as an example. The non-technical version of the story is that a device is installed in the car and information about the car’s location and some sort of state (ignition on/off, door open/closed, etc) need to be accessed by a spouse sitting in front of a computer or on their nifty, new call-dropping iPhone 3G. We provide the software infrastructure that makes this happen. More importantly, we do it for all sorts of different devices, whether they use cellular or satellite communications, or come from different hardware manufacturers.

Who do we enable? Right now we enable quite a few folks: ourselves, small businesses, developers, and universities. We call this part of our business The Foundation. It’s the infrastructure that enables the rapid creation of M2M applications. We’ve done it several times over and it only makes sense to share our expertise with the world.

So how does Numerex fit into this picture? Quite well, if you ask me. The reality of any M2M application is there’s a lonely device sitting in an obscure, remote location. Most of the time these devices will be installed and never touched again. All communication with this device is done wirelessly over a GSM network (identical to how your mobile phone communicates). Numerex is the wireless network that bridges the gap between our software and the remote device. Numerex also has solutions for markets other than the location based market Ublip is focused on. Now under one umbrella we’ll be able to go after new opportunities together and provide, as Stratton puts it, a “one stop shop for M2M applications.”

Thanks for taking the time to read this and for all your support.

We’re off to do great things.