As you may know, I work in the field of Machine-to-Machine or M2M which is another word for remote monitoring and control usually using public wireless networks including GPS tracking which is the focus of my current venture Ublip. I have also always been a proponent of developing online communities of developers and others in order to help the growth of an industry. This is why I am now involved in the creation of a forum site for the M2M industry. Please check out M2MForums and participate if you are so inclined.
As you may know, I work at Ublip, Inc., a GPS tracking provider. One of our goals at Ublip is to incorporate Web 2.0 principals into our product offering. Most GPS tracking services have a walled garden so that you have no way of getting your data out if you want to use it elsewhere.
One of the technologies we are experimenting with to this end is GeoRSS which is a way of adding location information to RSS feeds. However, one of the issues that we have to deal with is security and privacy. Most customers would not want to make the real-time location of their vehicles publicly available, although there are some cases where that does make sense. I recently implemented a GeoRSS feed with Basic HTTP authentication over HTTPS. This is reasonably secure and supported by most RSS readers. However, when I went looking for a GeoRSS client that supported it, I came up empty.
Mapufacture has expressed an interest in supporting it in the future. We are discussing how this might be accomplished.
I had some success with Yahoo! Pipes. After some digging, I figured out that Pipes will support http authentication if you encode the URL as http://username:password@feed.url. However, I ran into two problems here. First, our usernames are email addresses and the @ caused a problem, however this was easily solved by escaping it as %40. The second problem is that https doesn’t seem to work. I have yet to figure out if this is just a limitation of Pipes or not.
Here is what the pipe looked like first in the editor, and then while running. You’ll need to click on them to be able to read anything.
Of course, the big problem here is that my username and password are encoded in the pipe. If I publish the pipe, everyone can see them. If I don’t publish the pipe, Yahoo guarantees a level of security through obscurity. The URL for the pipe is secret and not indexed. This level of security is not good enough for an application, but it was an interesting experiment.
Of all the companies I expected to see releasing a GPS asset tracking product, FujiFilm was not high on my list. However, they have recently announced they will be releasing a Tape Tracker in Q1 2008. Designed not to track a single tape, but take the place of one tape in a shipping container and claiming to have a GPS sensitivity that is high enough to work inside trucks. This sort of device would be very useful in preventing incidents like when Bank of America lost information on 1.2 million credit cards. FujiFilm plans to offer their own web-based tracking application, but I hope that they are also willing to sell the device to 3rd party tracking service providers like Ublip where I work.
I just had to share this. It is a parody of a familiar song performed at the RIPE 55 conference in Amsterdam. I never would have thought you could write a good song about IPv6.
I have to use RS232 ports to communicate to devices all the time. I use a MacBook Pro, but often device setup software is only available for Windows so I installed Parallels Desktop. However, I have been unable to get a USB/Serial converter to work with Windows XP under parallels until now. I just found the Eudyptes Serial Client which worked the first time I tried it. It does take a few extra steps, but it is certainly better than having to move to a different machine.
Less than a month ago, TomTom finalized a $2.5 Billion bid to buy TeleAtlas. Now, Garmin has announced a $3.3 Billion bid. TomTom has promised to reply. Read more here.
According to the latest J.D. Power and Associates survey of smartphone users over 40% of users want their smartphones to have GPS capabilities. This is good news for me since my day job at Ublip, Inc. is GPS tracking and we want to eventually include phones in our offering. Although I’m sure that people want the capability just for navigation and local search, once it is there applications to do far more interesting things can be installed.
When my son showed me this game, I was at first a little concerned that they let him play this at school. But the problem is, although the SPCA would probably object, its really fun. I played it with him for almost an hour, my high score was 1607.
Just got back from the X-Prize Cup. It was definitely a disappointment this year, mostly because it was so much fun last year and my expectations were very high. This year the event was moved to Holloman Air Force Base, they had parking set-up on a runway and then after going through a security check we were bussed to the actual show. The problems started there, our bus was stopped for the better part of an hour because they decided to close the road while Armadillo attempted their first flight. Nobody told us why we were stopped mind you.
After we spent a couple of hours looking at exhibits we decided it was time to sit down for awhile. Last year, there was a large shaded pavilion with tables and chairs, as well as a beer garden provided by one of the area microbreweries, so we expected something similar this year. It turned out to be too much to expect, there was not a single place to sit down in the entire place, nor was there any good beer to be had. Well, that is not actually true. The reality we discovered was a bit worse than that. We did eventually find a shaded pavilion featuring burgers and Paulaner Beer, only to be informed it was there for the employees of the air show only. You can imagine what this did for our moods. The area was very large, so there was plenty of room to set-up a place to sit. It just does not seem like rocket science to me that you should give people a place to sit down in the shade and eat lunch. Last year they charged admission, but this year it was free. We eventually purchased some folding chairs for $20 which is similar to the admission price we expected to pay.
I really want this event to flourish, so I hope those in charge will do a better job next year. I do not regret attending, and I will go back next year. I intend to email the X-Prize Foundation about this and hopefully they will take my criticism constructively.
A high point of our trip was our accommodations. We stayed at Bear Ridge Log Cabin and it was awesome. The pictures on their website do not do it justice, the place is huge and an incredible bargain at around $200/night. There were only three of us, but we could have easily put ten people in that place. I took a really bad video walkthrough with my camera phone, I appologize for the quality, but I didn’t think to bring a video camera.
. However, I have been unable to get a USB/Serial converter to work with Windows XP under parallels until now. I just found the 
