Vyrotek|Bridging the gap between code and wealth

Lately I’ve been getting excited about a new startup that is based here in Salt Lake City and about to go live. They are called S5 Wireless and they track stuff without GPS! They have essentially created a small microchip that can be attached to almost anything which enables you to track its location with GPS accuracy. Another amazing thing is that it works great indoors. They sell their service OEM to anyone who wants to track something. They expose a simple webservice that when queried with the identifier of the chip they will respond with its current location. They aren’t quite live yet but I did speak to them on the phone for a few minutes to try and learn what I could. They informed me that they plan to have their webservice API and marketing details polished and ready for use around 3rd Quarter.

So, how does it work? How much does it cost? Check out their site for a bit more information.
http://www.s5w.com/Products/FAQ.html

Also check out some other articles people have written about them.
Gizmondo - Poor Man’s LoJack
ABC News - Utah company takes crack at problem of tracking

UPDATE:

I found a article that covers a Q&A session with the CEO of S5 Wireless and its very interesting. There is a bit more information in this one. Check it out here - S5 Wireless Interview with David Carter, CEO

Here are some parts I found the most interesting:

“If you just imagine all of the things that are of value to you, would you pay $10 or less for a tag and a couple of dollars a month to keep up with them, to know where your children are when they’re out with the family car or on a camping trip in the mountains with the Boy Scouts or the Girl Scouts?”

“The location and telemetry information is then sent to the customer in near real-time. The tracking accuracy is comparable to GPS, and we can deliver about 60 bits of telemetry with every transmission, enabling monitoring of fuel levels, temperatures, heart rate, etc.”

Today I had the opportunity to attend the Utah CodeCamp and I learned quite a few new things. The main reason I wanted to go was to listen to Mark from Medicity give his presentation on the new Asp.net MVC Framework. He probably gave one of the best presentation there today. I made sure it was clear at work that I had high expectations, so maybe that helped?

So what’s the big deal about the new MVC Framework? Oh it’s only the best thing to happen to Asp.net ever! I never really played with classic Asp much but I’m told it has some similarities and you might feel like things are moving backwards, but it really is for the best. If you’re familiar with how JSP (yuck) works with the MVC pattern then a lot of the new things will feel very familiar.

The biggest shock to me was how they have basically eliminated the page life cycle and the traditional postback. Until now, in Asp whenever you wanted to fire some click event the client posted back to the aspx, recreated the entire page again firing off the pageload and all the other junk and THEN invoked the click event. That has always bugged me! It is such waste of time to recreate an instance of a page that you’re probably going to throw away anyway.  That’s because the majority of the time you direct the user to different page when they invoke some event. Now, your buttons invoke specific ‘actions’ on your controller and the controller decides what data to pull from the model and what view to use.

I’m not going to go into much more detail now but I’ll try share any new findings in future posts. Until then, check out Scott Gu’s blog for more info!

Thanks Mark for an awesome presentation!