Airbase is the first all-in-one spend management platform that provides companies unparalleled control and visibility into every dollar spent. Finance teams deserve a solution that eliminates the tedious work involved in managing spend and allows them to focus on being strategic partners to the rest of the business. We do that by replacing the multiple systems typically used to manage spend with a single platform that handles every workflow including expense approvals and payments (physical cards, virtual cards, ACH, check), while also automating away the bulk of spend-related accounting. Our customers include companies like Gusto, Netlify, Getaround, Segment and many others.
The last thing we wanted to do was build hardware! But, we could not deliver the experience we wanted to without building it. This blog post describes some of the reasons we built hardware - http://blog.automatic.com/why-we-built-the-link/
We did not support Diesel cars when we launched two years ago. We do now. You can continue to use the device you have now if you car is model year 2006 or later, but please drive for a bit and let the firmware update to the latest version. The latest generation of the hardware supports Diesel as well.
It was very clearly mentioned in various places on our website that Diesel cars were not supported before we added support, but we're happy to give you a refund if you missed it and never got to use the product. Please send an email to [email protected] and point them to this comment and they'll take care of it for you.
You're absolutely right that there is a lot more information in cars than we expose right now. What we're announcing today is the first step. The goal is to continue to expose more and more data over time via simple to use APIs.
Hi TeeWEE, imagine if every car had an API that you could build apps for and drivers could give you access to the data via OAuth. That's basically what the developer platform lets you do. We have a REST API, real-time events via webhooks / websockets and a direct Bluetooth API to the car for mobile clients to access data from the CAN bus directly.
I'm sorry you did not have a great experience with our first gen device. We're announcing the second generation device today with the developer platform. The connectivity issues some of our users experienced with the first gen device were mainly due to BTLE. The second gen device has MFi support which allows us to support classic Bluetooth with iPhones. It's much more reliable. You must have received an email with a discount code. I hope you try it. We're also happy to help you get to the bottom of your issues if you write to [email protected].
hi dlokshin, we support the iPhone 4S and 5 because those are the only models that support Bluetooth 4.0. I'm sure we can theoretically support every Android phone out there, but as a small team, we'd rather focus on a smaller set and provide the best experience possible. Our goal is to support as many Android phones as possible over time.
The Automatic Link supports both classic bluetooth and bluetooth 4.0, so it will work with both iPhones and Android phones.
We'd love to build an API. It's on a long list of things we want to build. The Automatic Link supports OTA updates (through the phone). So, our users can expect improvements. In fact, we think of ourselves as a software company. We built a hardware device because that was the only way we could achieve the user experience we wanted to deliver.
We're paranoid about not running your car's battery down. When the ignition is off, we consume less than 1 mA. By itself, the Automatic Link would take 3-4 years to drain even a cheap battery.
Hey isalmon, fuel efficiency is not related to the speed limit. We just use that as a frame of reference. The actual numbers are that fuel efficiency drops by 12-15% for every 10 mph above 50 mph. Here's an article which talks about that - http://www.greencarcongress.com/2013/01/thomas-20130117.html
The concept of having to reinvent stuff because we lost all of the tacit knowledge associated with it is very interesting. Donald MacKenzie wrote about this in the context of nuclear weapons -
Tacit knowledge and the uninvention of nuclear weapons ( http://books.google.com/books?id=c5YaHkcP6DEC&lpg=PP1... )
It's highly recommended if you're wondering how things can get uninvented.
Airbase is the first all-in-one spend management platform that provides companies unparalleled control and visibility into every dollar spent. Finance teams deserve a solution that eliminates the tedious work involved in managing spend and allows them to focus on being strategic partners to the rest of the business. We do that by replacing the multiple systems typically used to manage spend with a single platform that handles every workflow including expense approvals and payments (physical cards, virtual cards, ACH, check), while also automating away the bulk of spend-related accounting. Our customers include companies like Gusto, Netlify, Getaround, Segment and many others.
We're hiring Product Managers and Sr. Product Managers. More details here: https://www.notion.so/airbasehq/Product-Manager-Sr-Product-M...