Birkett Enterprise Ltd

I thought that we should conclude 2010 with a blog post looking back at the past year.

In January, Birkett Enterprise launched a new phone tracking service, Phonelocator Periodic. Unlike the previous Phonelocator service, retrospectively dubbed Phonelocator Trail,  Phonelocator Periodic can be run in the background on the phone all the time without a noticeable effect on the phone’s battery life. Despite Phonelocator Trail‘s battery saver and intelligent update features, running the application constantly was not an option on some phones. This was because the drain on the battery caused by the GPS (especially A-GPS which requires an open data context) was too great. Phonelocator Periodic solves this problem by opening the GPS periodically rather than holding it open all the time when the phone is moving. This results in an application that can be run in the background all the time without a perceivable effect on battery life. The cost of this approach is the detail of the information recorded; rather than seeing a trail  it’s only possible to see discrete points on the map.

At the time of writing, Phonelocator Periodic has been downloaded more than 934787 times from the Nokia Ovi store which has resulted in more than 200,000 registrations on the web site.

A new version of Phonelocator Periodic app for Symbian OS, version 1.0,  was completed in December and Symbian Signed and will be available on the Ovi store just as soon as it has completed the Ovi Store’s QA process. The new version boasts: lost phone alarm, passcode protected uninstall, hidden trigger messages, better GPS accuracy and more positioning methods.

In August, Birkett Enterprise launched Phonelocator Text, an application to send a phone’s location as a link in a text message to another phone. The application is available on the Ovi store here. In October, the application was updated to support the Arabic, Russian, German, Chinese (Mandarin), Italian, Swedish, Spanish, Portuguese and Norwegian languages.

This year Birkett Enterprise have collaborated with a Brazilian company, VIA Rastreamento, to developed a tracking application to compliment VIA Rastreamento‘s existing tracking service that uses bespoke tracking hardware.

After running Phonelocator Trail on Dreamhost servers since it’s launch in July 2008, this year we moved both Phonelocator Trail and Phonelocator Periodic to Linode servers.  Dreamhost disabled the Phonelocator service because despite running on it’s own virtual server it was “loading down the entire host”. So far, Birkett Enterpise are very happy with the Linode service and their customer service who have dealt with queries promptly and courteously.

Our hopes for 2011 are:

• More Symbian OS apps based on the Phonelocator code base
• Improved Phonelocator web application
• Android based tracking client

Happy new year!

Phonelocator Periodic, the Birkett Enterprise phone tracking service, reached a big milestone today (9. December 2010). The service, launched January 18. 2010, now has 200,000 registered users! Around 20,000 phones are sending their location to Phonelocator Periodic week and the Phonelocator Periodic web site receives around 1000 unique visitors daily.

Earlier today, Phonelocator Periodic, Birkettt Enterprise’s phone tracking application, smashed through the 50,000 registered users mark. This success is thanks largely to the applications prominence on the Nokia ovi store. Currently, new user is registering every 28 seconds! More stats can be found here.

Ronald from http://www.comprax.nl/ has successfully integrated his web page with the Phonelocator periodic JSON API. The results and .php source code can be found here: http://www.comprax.nl/phonedemo/

Phone locations can be retrieved from the Phonelocator periodic server in JSON format if their locations are set to public. The phone’s ID is specified in the following url: http://periodic.phonelocator.mobi/locations.json?handset_id=1091 (here the id is 1091) The phone’s ID can be discovered from the “Updates” link on the “My Phones” page on the http://periodic.phonelocator.mobi site.

The Phonelocator web app and ‘daemon’ have been released under the business friendly, Eclipse Public Licence allowing 3rd parties to integrate Phonelocator tracking clients with existing services and build new domain specific tracking applications. The web app and ‘daemon’ are available here.

Birkett Enterprise can provide bespoke tracking applications, based on the Phonelocator tracker, for integration with your service that support GPS, Wifi/CellID location and SMS integration. Please contact us for more information.

Thanks in part to being added to the Nokia Ovi Store, Phonelocator periodic is now getting around 1000 new users every day, see the screenshot below: