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Show HN: Gping.io – Like TinyURL for your car

gping.io

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Re: Show HN: Gping.io – Like TinyURL for your car

#31

I don't know if I'd describe it as "TinyURL for your car", but after reading about what it does the description makes sense. It might be hard for people to initially "get" though. Where I see some future potential is in fleet management for smaller fleets (think your local plumber that has a couple of work vans, or maybe a small taxi company, etc). Being able to inexpensively monitor the locations of the vehicles, ho…

Samsara [0] does this too.

[0] https://www.samsara.com

Re: Show HN: Gping.io – Like TinyURL for your car

#32
Mojio[0] makes a neat integrated device that hits some of the same bullet points as this. I worked with some of their developers at an AT&T sponsored hackathon and had a good experience working with their API. Worth a look if you don't mind trading the open nature of this project for smaller packaging.

[0]https://www.moj.io

Re: Show HN: Gping.io – Like TinyURL for your car

#34
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't get it. TinyURL gets a url and makes it smaller, how is this TinyURL for your car?

TinyURL is a short URL that takes you to some piece of information on the web. This is a short URL that takes you to information about your car. I found the name confusing at first, but I can see the logic behind it.

How about just "get a URL for your car"?

Re: Show HN: Gping.io – Like TinyURL for your car

#36

I don't know if I'd describe it as "TinyURL for your car", but after reading about what it does the description makes sense. It might be hard for people to initially "get" though. Where I see some future potential is in fleet management for smaller fleets (think your local plumber that has a couple of work vans, or maybe a small taxi company, etc). Being able to inexpensively monitor the locations of the vehicles, ho…

This is exactly what Telogis (now owned by Verizon) does, except with dedicated hardware built in OEM.

Re: Show HN: Gping.io – Like TinyURL for your car

#38

For $99 Automatic already does this https://www.automatic.com

Okay, my solution requires a $5 adapter. I did not know about this; really exciting to find a competitor with a solution 20 times as expensive. Thank you!

There is also https://dash.by which works with many cheap OBDII devices, including Bluetooth ones. I was actually about to get started with them, but your setup is actually a cool idea. That is to say, you are combining an OBDII dongle and a cheap phone into what is essentially a single "device" which is actually internet connected.

My suggestion would be to research Automatic and Dash and see if you can improve on their setup by bundling all three components into one: try to actually create a device that combines and OBDII dongle, a GPRS modem, a GPS chip, etc. Also see if you can find and white label a cellular provider similar to RingPlus do you can do the whole thing as a service: $5/month plus a $100 device is not a bad deal.

Re: Show HN: Gping.io – Like TinyURL for your car

#39
post #7

I don't know if I'd describe it as "TinyURL for your car", but after reading about what it does the description makes sense. It might be hard for people to initially "get" though. Where I see some future potential is in fleet management for smaller fleets (think your local plumber that has a couple of work vans, or maybe a small taxi company, etc). Being able to inexpensively monitor the locations of the vehicles, ho…

Thank you for your comments. Agree with everything you wrote. The words 'fleet management' may have bounced around in my head once or twice. Nod.

It's "find my phone" for your car.

Re: Show HN: Gping.io – Like TinyURL for your car

#40
For the various 'gas as a service' offerings, this would be ideal seeing as it offers current gas level.

Having this come with signup, and know that my car will auto-refill when it gets below 30% and is at home or work, would be pretty darn useful.

Maybe one of the companies already does this and I just didn't realize?

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