What is ViaLatM?

In the comments to the previous article, the question was raised - "what kind of service do you offer, what opportunities does it provide." Indeed, it is difficult to understand from the previous articles concerning the individual capabilities of the service what it is for and what it gives to end customers. On the site http://www.vialatm.com/home_ru.html there is also a little detailed review of the service. In this article I will try to briefly convey to whom and for what the service may be useful.

Personal use

Perhaps the main use in this aspect is taking care of children. Parents often worry about how and where their children spend their time. The service in this case is used as follows - you install one of the applications on the child’s smartphone that supports the work with the service, or you provide the child with a personal tracker, gps tracker with a clock, etc. After that, you will have access to the current location, movement paths, notifications about inputs / outputs from geozones you have defined.
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Another use - family members make regular trips - to the country, to relatives. If an application or tracker is set up to work with the service, you do not need to dial in or wait for a call about arrival, you can see it on the map in real time or receive notifications about events that have occurred.

Another application - your family member went on vacation, hiking, traveling. Having installed an application on his smartphone, with support from the service, you can look at the tracks of its movement live and receive photos taken in different places.

These are all real and most common examples of using the service.

Several users use the service to control their regular bike rides. Perhaps they control their sporting achievements or calorie consumption counts.

Company with a small fleet of vehicles

For companies with a small fleet, connecting to large vehicle monitoring services is sometimes unprofitable. Often, the functionality provided by the systems is not required for a small company and / or difficult to master. The company can independently install inexpensive trackers (ASC, BCE, GT06) on their cars, configure them for ViaLatM service and use it for free. The service provides the ability to create geozones with notifications about events associated with them; speeding notifications; various reports on mileage, fuel consumption, geolocation and others. The head always sees where his cars are now, where they went yesterday, the day before yesterday, ... and what mileage is covered for certain periods.

There are two companies that control employees through mobile applications and also receive reports on their visit to certain geozones.

And one company with the help of ViaLatM service provides its customers with online monitoring of the delivery of goods on orders.

Internet of things

This loud theme is gaining momentum. But for the end user, there is little simple boxed solutions yet (at least I don’t know). It is necessary to install a mini computer at home (like “Raspberry Pi”, ...), arrange sensors around the house, configure them to work with this mini computer, and install software on it so that the information received from the sensors is not sent to the server. We'll have to wait for industrial box solutions when the user needs to enter only the server address and password into this mini computer. Now in ViaLatM implemented work on the MQTT protocol. Work on the COAP protocol is in the testing phase. ViaLatM service allows you to display information of IoT objects in the form of graphs and tables; in a simple and convenient way to send commands and settings to objects; receive notifications about the states of objects.

How does the service earn money?

More precisely on what is going to earn (at the moment the service is not monetized). The service is and will be free without any restrictions on the number of devices, geofences, groups (except that the event history is stored no more than 1 year). Monetization of the service is planned for advertising. At the same time, not just advertising banners and announcements are planned, but more targeted advertising taking into account the interests and locations of users. I will not disclose the details, now we are working on business processes with one advertising company.

Conclusion

I would like to hear the views of the readers - “could I convey the purpose of the service for end users”? .. I guess the question is “Why reinvent the wheel? .. All this is already there and done better than you!”. Often, the "bicycle" is not invented to do nothing, but simply because it is not seen. And if you think that ViaLatM is a “bicycle” invention, tell me where you can see it.