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By Rob Irving, Senior Software Developer

For the past 5+ years as an ALK developer I’ve watched the smartphone ecosystem change at an incredible pace. CoPilot first began over 10 years ago on the Pocket PC/Windows Mobile platforms. Years later we were able to move to iOS and Android as those platforms expanded the Smartphone consumer market. The release of Windows Phone 7 really excited me, but limitations of the SDK prevented ALK from being able to develop a CoPilot application for the platform. It wasn’t that we didn’t want to support the platform, but we wanted to make sure we would have been able to create an experience worthy of the CoPilot name.

We just wrapped up our ninth ALK Transportation Technology Summit here in Princeton. Thanks to all of our attendees, sponsors and presenters.

On Tuesday, April 9^th, we partnered with the American Red Cross to host a blood drive at our Princeton, New Jersey headquarters.  The Red Cross collected 24 pints of blood.  As a result, 72 lives will be saved thanks to our ALK volunteers!

Giving back is extremely rewarding.  We’re thrilled to have had such a great turnout at our blood drive and to have helped save so many lives.

Some Blood Facts:

Blood is composed of several elements, each of which performs a special function in the body.  Whole blood contains red cells, white cells and platelets suspended in plasma. These components can be separated and transfused to up to three patients.

Red Blood Cells – help treat anemia or acute blood loss and carry oxygen from the lungs to the tissues.  Red Blood cells last up to 42 days.

Platelets – help control bleeding, replace platelets destroyed by disease or cancer therapy.  Platelets must be used within 5 days.
Plasma – supplies nutrients to cells and are used to replace fluids in shock and burn victims.  Frozen plasma may be kept for up to 1 year.

ALK Technologies wins the Motorola Solutions Best Mobility Applications Partner of the Year Award for Europe, Israel and Africa

Capping a year of significant wins based on Motorola Solutions mobile computers, ALK Technologies, a global leader in GeoLogistics™ and navigation software, was named Best Mobility Applications Partner of the Year at the Motorola Solutions Executive Partner Conference in Sorrento, Italy.

As industry leaders in mapping, navigation and GeoLogistics™, ALK is sure to make it to industry events in 2013 on time and in style!

We’re very excited to announce the official release of our latest innovation, ALK Maps, a development tool used to create mapping and routing visualizations with our proven data sets and algorithms.

What is ALK Maps?

ALK Maps is a JavaScript API that developers can use to build their own mapping applications similar to Google Maps API or Bing Maps API.  The key difference is, ALK Maps was designed specifically for the transportation and logistics industry, as it provides the industry standard truck-specific routing, mapping, geocoding and visualization found in our PC*MILER solutions.  We are also planning to add international data coverage, similar to that used in our CoPilot Live Professional solutions which are currently available in over 50 countries worldwide.

We created ALK Maps in response to feedback from our commercial customers who were trying to use conventional mapping toolkits but found the routing capabilities lacking what they needed to calculate and display accurate commercial routes.

More importantly, what can you do with it?

ALK Maps enables you to overlay and visualize your own geographic data and combine it with the industry-standard commercial mapping and routing ALK has built over the last 30 years.  Even though our desktop and mobile solutions are continuously being improved, many of our customers find value in integrating their own proprietary data and workflows with ALK’s solutions.

Featuring an easy to learn JavaScript API, developers can begin a basic mapping web application in just a few lines of code.  We’ve also included a number of examples and demos in our developer portal to help in getting started.  In addition to routing, the ALK Maps API offers geocoding functionality to find addresses or translate latitude and longitude locations back into addresses.  There are many functions to allow almost any kind of geographic data  to be displayed over ALK Maps, enabling the creation of rich visualization applications.  There are even weather and traffic overlays that can be included in the applications.

I have spent the past year creating ALK Maps with our Server and Web Applications Team and we couldn’t be happier to present ALK Maps to all of you officially.  Over the last few months a number of our customers have been beta testing the product and we’re thrilled to hear they can’t wait to get their hands on the finished product.  Our work, of course, is never done and we are planning to continuously evolve and improve ALK Maps to ensure it is the best it can be.