Can you ever have enough Santas?

By: Alun Rowe

Way back in 2012 I took part in a charity rally named Scally Rally along with a group of keen Thame Round Table Members.  As part of the event, we felt it would be good if our sponsors and fans could see where we were on a map to track our progress.  At the time technologies such as GPS logging were relatively new and expensive so I took it upon myself to find a cheaper way to achieve what we needed.  From this a very simplistic GPS Logging Android App was created and a simple API that would accept a password, longitude and latitude in order to log our movements.

Roll on to 2014 and I received an exasperated phone call from Thame Round Table.  Santa was successfully navigating around Thame bringing joy to lots of families but in the cabin of the truck pulling Santa’s sleigh things were getting increasingly fraught trying to update Facebook and Twitter to let people know where and when Santa would be visiting their particular road alongside managing the collectors and providing navigational assistance.  Within a few days the charity rally tracker was reborn as SantaTracker!

Since 2014 we’ve spoken to a number of charity groups around the UK and have provided tracking for a lot of charity events but, as is often the way, we’ve forgotten to shout about it!  We’ve helped Santa in Thame, Chinnor, Wokingham, Maidenhead and this week we’ve added Oxford!  So, if you are a charitable cause and need a GPS logger that can display onto a website we can help!  Better yet we don’t charge a single penny for our solution which can support multiple markers (perhaps for a charity rally so you can see all the competitors?) and provide simple to update schedules so your excitable fans can anticipate your arrival!

Read more about our charity tracking solution here