I saw a competitor’s [I would never name names -- just that they start with an F and end with a s and they're an Irish company...] blog the other day which stated they recently added support for Google Earth, and that they were “the first telematics solution to use Google Earth mapping.”
We have supported Google Earth since 6/29/2005, nearly FOUR YEARS AGO, and I’m going to point that out.
Additionally, our Google Earth, nearly 4 years old, is LIGHT YEARS beyond any I’ve seen in a competitor’s GPS Tracking product.
The day Google Earth launched, I saw it on the Bloomberg Terminal I was using, downloaded it, saw it could be used to enhance GPS Insight, and immediately wrote some (very primitive) support into our product. This was back in the day when I was still able to code things myself… Now we have some of the best developers I’ve worked with, and they do all the heavy code lifting.
Anyway, I want to point out that this blog has 23 articles (including this one) about Google Earth usage within GPS Insight, dating back to October of 2007, right after I started writing these articles.
Here they are — use the categories on the left to see only articles on the topics which interest you: http://blog.gpsinsight.com/?cat=14
I will spend a little more time detailing the usage of Google Earth within GPS Insight, as it is the cornerstone for “power usage” of the product, and yields tremendous advantages over other mapping.
Here are a few things we do which are beyond the “typical” support of Google Earth:
- Polygon Landmark compatibility
- Time Lapse Movie view of history
- One Click, Secure .kmz links of your fleet and landmarks
- Drag and drop creation of landmarks from Google Earth search results
- Tens of Thousands of objects supported at once
I won’t give away our roadmap — for that, the competition needs to view our freely available demos (they do, I get a report…).
By the way, here’s a quick screenshot of Santa Monica, CA — we just returned from there and I was curious how big they are and how many miles/hours we spent there doing installs last week. I’ll detail how we determined that in the next blog article available here.
Google Earth is a great tool – just don’t trust companies saying they are “the only” provider out there supporting it.
I will say truthfully that GPS Insight was the FIRST to support it (someone try to beat 6/30/05), and has more functionality built around Google Earth than any other competitor, including F|$$!&@!|(s, regardless of what their blog states.
I’ll be celebrating their 4th birthday on 6/29/09 by gladly renewing all our Google Earth Pro licenses, which allow you to do a few extra things like compute area, as shown above.
Rob.