Sorry. I couldn't resist the Buzz Lightyear reference.
Eric and I spent this past week at the Ag Leader Dealer Meeting. It was good to hear about the continued development that Ag Leader is doing across all of their products lines. Since their acquisition of Intellislope, they have been hard at work improving the interface on the Integra and adding features to their SMS desktop software. Lots of neat additions and refinements are done or in the works. All of the other products lines had interesting bits as well, but by far the most interesting and the one with the most potential was AgFiniti.
AgFiniti was announced at the Farm Progress in September. It is Ag Leader's entry into the cloud-based data storage and transfer market. Initially, we were only going to be able to transfer files, but in November they announced that Remote Support would also be available! We got to see it in action and it was sweet. There are a few limitations in the initial versions of both, but overall it is a great start. Of course, there are costs involved, but compared to the time saved by the customer and the dealer in the heat of the season it is a bargain.
An unexpected surprise was the announcement that they plan to offer Map View through AgFiniti sometime in 2014. No firm date yet, but this will be really useful. You will be able to upload any map and view it with your gps location shown on it through a browser on any device. Sounds like another great start!
There are 2 things to remember with AgFiniti versus other offerings.
- The data remains the user's completely. Ag Leader makes no claim whatsoever to the data. It will not be used in any way by them or 3rd parties or be aggregated in any way.
- The data connection will be provided by a cellular hotspot via wifi through your smartphone or tablet (if it has the feature) or standalone hotspot (e.g. Verizon's Jet Pack). The cool thing is you can pick the provider that works best for you and use it on the family vacation to keep the kids occupied during that long summer car trip.
There are many other things about AgFiniti that you may find useful and interesting (e.g. Sharing data with your crop advisor), so click "here" to go to Ag Leader's product page to find out more.