Every aspect of human life is touched by information technology. Today, the IT revolution has provided us the means to access travel time, distance, location information and generalized travel costs.

In particular, location-based technology has helped us to retrieve location related information to individual users, thus helping users to obtain helpful and adaptive information.

Axeda Corporation, a provider of cloud platform and applications, is using its award-winning M2M technology to support one of its own employees as she cycles to raise money for cancer research. Leslie Baker, the inspiration for the "Where is Leslie?" application: http://developer.axeda.com is an Axeda (News - Alert) technical support engineer who will ride in honor of her late father.  

Baker said that when my colleagues heard about my participation in Pan-Mass, they started brainstorming about the different ways that they could lend support to the cause and out of those sessions came an idea to use our technology to draw attention to the ride. A Flash application integrated with the Axeda Platform, the Where is Leslie? application tracks Leslie along the 192-mile route across Massachusetts.

An Axeda developer built the application in less than a week using the Axeda Platform's advanced rules engine, geofence capabilities, and Axeda Custom Objects. Using an Enfora (News - Alert) Mini MT edge device with a Wyless SIM card, the application sends latitude-longitude data to the Axeda Platform, leveraging its location-based services to determine Leslie's exact location at any point during the ride.

The application, available from the Axeda Developer Connection site integrates with Twitter using Axeda Expression Rules to send tweets as Leslie reaches pre-defined milestones by traveling outside of a set geofence. It displays local weather on the course by leveraging Yahoo Web Services to pull weather data based on zip code and tracks Leslie's fundraising goal, encouraging visitors to donate.

Dale Calder (News - Alert), president and CEO, Axeda Corporation said that this campaign reflects the innovative spirit of the company’s employees as well as the power of the company’s technology and partner ecosystem and Axeda is very excited to support one of our team members in this important fundraising event. To raise awareness for the Pan-Mass Challenge, Axeda is also giving away a choice of  four Boston Red Sox tickets or an iPad to the person who guesses (or comes closest) to Leslie's destination time.