Marrying technological and environmentally-conscious lifestyles, Lisa Hull, co-founder of NearBio, brings two new widgets to mobile phone users through uLocate Communications, Inc.’s WHERE™ Platform. Launched earlier this year, WHERE is the first mobile GPS widget platform for rapid development and publishing of location enabled wireless content and applications. The NearBio team’s experience illustrates the WHERE Platform’s ability to dramatically streamline the widget development process, saving time and money.
The NearBio widget provides the five nearest biodiesel fueling locations based on the user’s current location, using the most comprehensive database of locations available. Directions, hours, blends, and payment information are included for user convenience. The second widget provides current and forecasted air quality (updated every hour) using the nearest Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) air quality monitoring station.
“The WHERE platform has dramatically improved the usability of our biodiesel locator service by eliminating the need for users to know exactly WHERE they are in order to enter their city and state or zip code,” said Ms. Hull.
“Importantly, the development took less than 24 hours, and required no testing of a multitude of handsets or negotiations with a mobile operator. In fact, without WHERE, the development of our air quality widget would have been impossible because of the development time required. We consider the WHERE application to be the most important milestone in location-based services in the last several years,” added Ms. Hull.
uLocate’s mobile GPS widget platform, WHERE, is the first of its kind on the market and is free via the WHERE Developer Program. With the WHERE platform, the time required to develop GPS-based applications is dramatically reduced, providing speed to market advantages as well as significant cost savings, while also eliminating the potential for technical errors and complex challenges. As a result, WHERE makes it possible for content owners and developers to create valuable and practical mobile GPS applications across multiple mobile devices.
“GPS applications, while useful, are historically difficult to develop,” said Walt Doyle, president and chief executive officer of uLocate. “The time required to build a GPS-based application can take twelve months or more. Plus, developers must also integrate their applications with one or multiple carrier platforms. This all requires extensive time, money and business development skills as partnerships have to be formed. Many developers have shied away from such an undertaking.”
WHERE leverages the same GPS-based technology underpinning MapQuest Find Me and other popular mobile applications. The platform uses simple, yet powerful WHERE mark-up language and scripting to allow developers to write in their preferred development language to quickly assemble applications on mobile handsets. All the tools, documentation technologies and services needed to get started can be found at: www.where.com/create.
About NearBio
NearBio (www.nearbio.com) is operated and invented by WHDC LLC (Nevada City, CA), a privately held company specializing in unique, distributed mobile applications. The company has four patents pending relating to mobile imaging, telephony, and nutrition and maintains a comprehensive database of over 1200 US biodiesel retail fueling locations.
About uLocate
uLocate Communications, Inc. (www.ulocate.com) is a privately held, venture-backed leader in consumer location-based services headquartered in Framingham, Mass. uLocate powers consumer location based services (LBS) applications for partners including MapQuest, Track-em, Global Pet Finder and offers direct to consumer LBS under its own brands including WHERE. Dozen of widgets built through the WHERE Developer Program are publicly available. For more information on WHERE, visit www.where.com.
