Mar 02 2009

Zoo II — How much time at the Giraffes?

My last article detailed how I took a very small tracking device to the zoo to track my day there. Incidentally, that tracking device has been reporting every 2 minutes for the past 36 hours (I’ll let you know when its rechargeable battery finally needs recharging later).

I want to quickly illustrate how fast it is to overlay a map of the zoo (my son brought one home & I scanned it) in order to determine how much time I spent at a particular area (my daughter loves the Giraffes so we went there first).

After importing the overlay in Google Earth, we stretch it to fit the roads, lakes, boundaries, etc. This is covered in other “Overlay” subject blog articles.

We can measure (using the Pro version of Google Earth) that the zoo is roughly 90 acres:

GPS Insight overlay of the Phoenix Zoo Map

Dialing down the “Opacity slider” we can see through the overlay to the “real map” to determine the distance between the real Carousel and the map carousel — only 139 feet off. This map is not military grade but it works for our purposes. We can also see the Giraffe just above the carousel. They are my daughter’s 2 favorite things at the zoo, we start our trip with the Giraffes then end with the Carousel before we leave (and a toy from the gift shop to avoid a scene…).

Phoenix Zoo Carousel in Google Earth vs. the visitors’ map

Here we can zoom down and bring in the tracking history of our zoo visit:

Giraffe time

It is easy to see we were walking through the zoo at 13:31, then got to the giraffes at 13:33, left at 13:41, took a wrong turn finding the entrance to the Amphibian exhibit, then got inside the Amphibian exhibit at 13:45. Well, if you use our product regularly, trust me, it’s easy to see.

You can create geofences around key areas, set up automated alarms to notify someone via email/cell SMS message whenever someone goes inside those zones, and can set up automated reports showing how much time is spent over a week at the various areas of the zoo (or your business, or the companies/subdivisions which pay you for servicing them, securing them, visiting them, etc.).

Obviously I like to use “personal” non-business related examples to illustrate what can EASILY be done using GPS Insight. I hope you can draw some analogies to how to use our product in your business in order to save money/time, reduce risk, increase efficiency, and understand and investigate/defend employee activity.

Here is a “zoomed out” version of the Zoo map overlay — you can use subdivision maps, Army Maps, Farm maps, or really any overlay useful to your business as a guide to interpreting data, quantifying activity, and identifying points of interest relative to your vehicles’ or employees’ activity.

GPS Insight map overlay

Thanks,
Rob.

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