GPS chips have been in leading smartphone models from the time when Apple released the App Store and Google released Android OS in 2008. Turn-by-turn navigation and the pale blue dot on the map have been a part of our lives since we started using apps. Apps have practically been location aware for as long as there have been apps on iOS and Android that is eight years and counting. Think of the last time you downloaded an app that did not ask you permission to access your location.
Tracking should therefore be a solved problem right? If I can navigate turn-by-turn and know where I am at all times (even when in the airplane) it should be as straightforward to track someone else turn-by-turn (with their permission of course) and see where they are at all times. It should be easy to track people and things in our lives turn-by-turn just as we track our Uber. Turns out it’s not.
The HyperTrack team dug deeper and concluded that developers needed a service that would make it far easier for them to implement location tracking than it is right now. It would not take more than a few minutes and a few API calls to get tracking that just works for how you want to use it. Nearly a year since we first started building HyperTrack we have something that we feel is worthy of sharing with the larger developer community. In the four months that we have been in private Beta we received requests from over 150 companies from over 10 countries to access the APIs. We provided access to a selected group of 50 companies.
We are glad to share that over 20 of them are already testing our service on live trips while others are in various stages of rolling out. These early users represent a variety of market spaces and include on-demand logistics service ShadowFax restaurant delivery service Scootsy pharmacy delivery service Pharmeasy and food delivery from own kitchen Holachef and Petoo; all using HyperTrack to monitor their delivery workforce and power a great end customer experience. Ridesharing service HeyTaxi is counting on HyperTrack to power an Uber-like tracking experience for their end customers and for tracking their own vehicles. The original Indian craft beer Bira’s logistics provider BookMyStorage is using HyperTrack to track BIRA 91’s draft machines as they make their way from warehouse to store. Education company Toppr is tracking sales visits and on-demand services startup Skiwee is tracking service visits using HyperTrack. We learned tremendously by looking over the shoulders of our early users and came up with this current product.
To touch and feel our own tracking experience from the early days the HyperTrack team created an app called SendETA to let our friends and family track us live. SendETA became a great way for developers to test the HyperTrack tracking experience before integrating. Opening the source code of the app to developers helped them better understand the integration as well as reuse the code to build their own driver apps to manage their workflow.
We are thrilled to announce the release of HyperTrack Beta to developers worldwide along with SendETA app to consumers worldwide. Now anyone can get access to our documentation or live demo of the dashboard experience and end customer tracking experience without having to sign up. Once you sign up you get access to our SDKs & APIs for integration and a free trial pack of 10000 tasks.
We have been pleasantly surprised with the kind of things developers are using HyperTrack for and are eager to see what cool things users do next. The HyperTrack team is standing by to support you. Happy tracking!
