Our Story – How Meili GPS is Changing GPS Tracking for Schools & Adventures

Meili was the brainchild of Stu Wells and Simon Purves, both directors of Location Extreme UK Limited, a technology company based in Oxford, England:

“We both love the outdoors, be it the serenity of dawn camping out alone in the Highlands of Scotland, or the rush of skiing fresh powder in the Alps, or the awe inspiring majesty you feel when kayaking on a Norweigan Fjord.

Meili was born of the need we felt for a simple rugged outdoor GPS tracking solution that could be used to track groups and individuals in the outdoors.

Simon is a DofE Organiser, and a school governor. He had grown frustrated trying to find an affordable and effective GPS system that he could use for his school's expeditions.

Both Simon & I ski regularly with our families and with friends. We both had experienced incidents in which party members (including both of us) had been injured whilst skiing and endured long waits to be found and helped.

In short, we saw a need for a system to safely monitor people in the outdoors using GPS.

It needed to be affordable, and it needed to work in the outdoor adventure playgrounds that people visit.

We also saw an urgent need within organisations to effectively mitigate risk when sending groups into the outdoors, particularly groups comprised of children and young adults. There have been too many headlines demonstrating what can happen when things goes wrong.

We saw a need, and with Meili we believed that we could fill that need. And so we built it. We hope you'll be as please with the results as we are."

- Stu Wells, CEO, Location Extreme

"We initially began by designing an app that would allow groups to stay connected outdoors by seeing where each other’s phones were, across platforms - a bit like Find My Phone but with outdoor maps.

We soon discovered that mobile signal was too patchy in the places we wanted to use the app, national park and the mountains.

We also noted that the GPS function on smartphones degrades the battery very quickly, especially in cold conditions, reducing GPS tracking functionality to less than a day. That's not good for expedition tracking, or even ski trips:

No-one wants to find that their phone's GPS has flattened the phone battery leaving you with no comms at all

We concluded that a smartphone should be viewed (in the outdoors) as a comms device, not relied on as a location tracker. It's the wrong tool for the job.

Additionally high end phones are too expensive to equip teams with for location tracking. There are also an array of privacy and safeguarding issues associated with using mobile phones to track people (particularly Under 18s) in the outdoors!

So...phoes are not the answer. We needed to find a more affordable, solution, we needed a GPS device that had the sole purpose of tracking people in the outdoors:

We envisaged a lightweight, personal outdoor GPS tracker that could function independently & continuously for at least 10 days.

The battery would need to be powerful enough to withstand cold conditions. It would need to be weatherproof, and crucially it have to cost under £100 per unit to make it affordable enough to equip expedition team members with a tracker each. "

- Simon Purves, CTO

"And so Meili was born, named after Meili, son of Odin, the Norse god of travellers: the Mile Stepper. It seemed somehow appropriate.

Meili GPS is a new brand and a new concept:

Meili combines next-gen GPS & NB-iOT enabled personal trackers, that are designed for the outdoors, with a new "tracker tracking" app: Meili Earth app, for iOS and Android.

Meili offers targeted functionality for tracking individuals and groups in the outdoors, and unique features that help you to mitigate risk, particularly when working with young people, such as the Meili Sharing Centre (for securely sharing tracker data with third parties), 1:25,000 maps and the ability to safely monitor multiple Meili Trackers, worldwide.

Whether you are engaged in DofE (Duke of Edinburgh Award) Expeditions, Scout, Cadets, or other Outward Bound activitites, or are an employer with employees lone working in remote locations, or have a family member that likes to venture out solo - Meili was designed with you in mind."

- Stu Wells & Simon Purves