Location Nation

Location Nation is an interesting new company that is marketing a multi purpose GPS tracker devices and SIMs along with the supporting online maps and communities to be used with those devices, while also offering a more simple way for those more sophisticated users that already own devices and capture waypoints on their devices to move POI data to and from navigation devices and share this data more easily with others.

Adding and or retrieving custom POI data from a personal navigation device is not an easy task if you've ever tried it. The Location Nation solution is attempting to change this by allowing users who already own a GPS device to easily grab POI data from a PND using their GPS Connector software and then publish it up to the Location Nation website to either share with friends or a larger web community. You can purchase disk space from Location Nation to upload lots of trip data and even add pictures and other multimedia elements to really give your friends back home a picture of the whole experience.

If you don't already own your own device Location Nation will also either rent or sell you one. It uses GPS combined w/ access to the GSM cellular network to report back the location of the device for pretty much any situation you may want. If you own a cell phone with built in GPS, LN Mobile is a small application that runs on your phone, which allows you to report location to the Location Nations web servers directly from the phone. This service seems to just be available on Boost at the moment.

The company offers a variety of service plans including 15 and 30 day rental models which include 10 minute reporting updates. So say you're about to take a cross country trip and think it would be fun to report on your progress to all your friends and family back home, you can rent the device and set up the online community online at locationation.com and invite your friends to follow your progress.

Other service plans appeal to corporate customers and individuals who may want to use the system longer term, either as an emergency beacon device ($12.95 per month) for 30 manual on demand locates up to a $39.95 per month plan for 2 minute updates when the device is in motion.

The hard core GPS users, particularly the geo caching types, will likely find this a great community and valuable software in GPS Connect. The online community aspect will add some additional value where other multi purpose GPS trackers don’t. It will be an interesting company to follow and see what kind of traction they get with the multi/any purpose approach to their devices.