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.