GPS Insight Blog

Feb 02 2010

HUGE safety addition to GPS Insight — the Speed Summary Report

Category: Driver Accountability, Identifying and eliminating speeding, New Features, Reporting, Reports, Safety — rdonat @ 6:24 pm

This new report shows the speeding and “slow-poke” tendencies of your individual drivers.

It can be run for a month at a time, and is available here (we are running the report for just the OKL group for the month of January):

Launching the GPS Insight Speed Summary report

Here is the part which allows you to rank by any of the major columns (click on the column heading) and you can see that OKL-69633-Service-Jasoncb is the top speeder on average. This is relative to the speed limit ONLY when he is exceeding the speed limit.

Ranking your speeders using GPS Insight's new Speed Summary Report

Conversely, you can click on “Laggard Avg” which will give you the top “slow-poke” (tie between the Manager and Chadc). This is ONLY when the driver is going LESS than the posted speed limit.

This is useful because both activities are undesirable. Padding hours by going slow is just as bad as being reckless and wasting fuel by speeding.

Clicking on any of the “at a glance” graphs to the right brings up a graph which compares a single driver’s speeding profile to the the entire group:

Graphically showing differences between a driver and the group average

This is the 4th in a series of enhancements to our speeding reports and graphs.

Since occasional discrepancies between GPS Insight’s data and actual posted speed limits occur, we have found it much more useful to run on a month-by-month “Macro” level to indicate undeniable trends in speeding.

Future enhancements will include posted speed limit alerts, group-by-group comparisons of speeding/lagging trends, and historical comparisons to prove that progress has been made in improving efficiency and curbing speeding using GPS Insight reports and alerts. Additionally, certain fields within these reports will launch supporting reports (e.g. a speeding report for just that single vehicle, to include violations on a map, etc.). Rapid acceleration and deceleration will be detected and reported upon for certain GPS Insight devices (notably the GO-3000 and GPSI-4000).

This report is available for all customers immediately, and currently has data going back to December 2009. We will add support for earlier months as we add functionality.

Click for information on the other reports we offer.

Thanks,
Rob.

Tags: gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking

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Jan 19 2010

Finding my snowboarding kid on the mountain with GPS Insight

Category: Arizona, EZ-1000, GPS Insight Employees, GPS Tracking, Google Earth, People Tracking, Safety, Skiing, mobile mapping — rdonat @ 11:27 pm

I pretty much have a never-ending supply of EZ-1000’s so I brought one skiing with my 2 boys on a recent trip.

Jack, my older son, is old enough to go skiing (boarding, he would correct me) without me. Actually, he has officially passed me by — he does black runs I refuse to do (small on a board is way better than big on skis when it comes to moguls).

I wanted to know where he was at one point so I ran a quick mobile map on my iPhone & put it in “compass mode” so I could see what direction he was from me.

Here it is (I’m the blue dot, Jack is the red pin):

GPS Insight EZ-1000 tracks my snowboarding son on the mountain

Here he really was (my eyes are better than the 3 megapixel camera on the iPhone…) — note that he’s between the lift & the ski patrol “house” just like the map shows it:

GPS Insight EZ-1000 tracks my snowboarding son on the mountain

I ran a 3D history of that device for the 2 days I remembered to bring it and put it in Jack’s pocket & it puts him exactly where my iPhone shows him at 1:44 (note the time in the first screen shot). Waiting 4 minutes at the bottom of the hill for his 2 friends:

Showing skiing activity using an EZ-1000 from GPS Insight

Also interesting is the straight lines which depict the lifts very clearly. The main lifts are in the “clutter” of dots on the left side, but the lifts we went on once each are really easy to spot toward the top right.

It’s easy to see which runs got the most use by turning off the “time slider” and looking at just the blue path:

GPS Tracking my son on the ski (board) slopes

Here are my two boarders:

Jack & Ryan on a snowboarding trip

And by looking at the GPS track as well as how well he was jumping and grinding, I can tell Jack went through the terrain park most of all:

Jack grinding/jumping off a box in the terrain park

I’ll try embedding a Facebook video I have of him going through the terrain park here:

Rob.

Tags: gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking

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Jan 04 2010

2 major new additions coming in January 2010 to GPS Insight!

Category: Driver Accountability, Identifying and eliminating speeding, New Features, Safety, cell phone capabilities, mobile mapping — rdonat @ 5:52 pm

Well, the holidays are over, and we’re getting back to business at GPS Insight.

There are 2 MAJOR additions coming in January.

We will release our Posted Speed Limit Report late this week or early next week
We will release an iPhone App toward the end of January (although Apple may take longer to approve for the App Store than that)

The Posted Speed Limit Report will let you know where your drivers are driving fast relative to the actual speed limit. It will come with other graphing enhancements to our regular speed alerts which will let you graph the 30 minutes before & after the speeding event in order to better understand what your drivers are doing. Additionally, if you use GPS Insight’s 3D Mapping with Google Earth, you will be able to click on the graph for an instant download of that vehicle for those 60 minutes.

Here are some screenshots:

Running a Posted Speed Limits Report on the “Robgroup” (my vehicles, and “Rob” has several devices installed):

GPS Insight Posted Speed Limits Report

Disclaimer!!!*** — I was not really doing 28 MPH over the speed limit — I’ll explain this after the report:

GPS Insight Posted Speed Limits Report

Clicking on the “Google Earth” button shows this:

GPS Insight 3D Posted Speed Violations View

That street is actually a 40 MPH zone (although I was definitely speeding — I live in the middle of the desert and it was 50 MPH when I moved there so I’m grandfathered in — is that a good excuse? How about I only needed some sample data for this article? My scofflaw COO borrowed the car? How about I have big brakes? Either way, I was speeding and this report picked it up.)

What is important to know is that the standard speeding report wouldn’t have really called attention to it so much. I was only doing 63 [65 max]. It’s 65 MPH standard on the highways out here. What’s important is the difference between ACTUAL and POSTED speed limits. 28 (really 23) in this case.

So how do you check to see what the real speed limit is? Just quickly go into street view in that area & find a speed limit sign:

Finding Stop Signs in GPS Insight's Google Earth Mode

Soon we will allow our customers to “override” certain street speed limits in order to accurately report on violations. Not every speed limit in our system is 100% up to date. It’s the ease of using it which makes this a quick and powerful tool. We plan to begin a “sanity check” service on our customers’ behalf where the most flagrant speeding will result in our double-checking the actual speed limits in that area.

Even if they are off by 5-15 MPH, this report is REALLY good at finding your opportunistic speeders.

Note the “inline” graph in the 3D “bubble” will also show up in the report for an instant check of recent/subsequent activity. Clicking on it gives a 30 minutes before/after map in Google Earth.

Speed Graphs in GPS Insight

[we're still working on the best way to graph it, so this will change soon]

Here is the 60 minute “quick map” you get when clicking on the graph:

60 minute "quick map" around a speeding violation

This is useful in order to get some context for what the driver was doing.

So this report will be EXTREMELY USEFUL to companies, and comes with a lengthy disclaimer that you need to put some time into investigating the speed limits initially before going off and firing drivers. It will also come with a follow-on report which “ranks” your drivers with graphs which show their typical speeding patterns. Since speed limits differ from our data equally across drivers, you will quickly get a feel for which of your drivers are speeders, which are ideal, and which intentionally go slower than they should in order to pad hours.

Moving on, we have an iPhone app coming in January. It will do a nicer job of mobile fleet management than the current GPS Insight Mobile Mapping option. Here are a few screen shots:

GPS Insight iPhone App coming soon!

You launch it from the iPhone like a normal app.

You are then given a set of options to choose from in terms of moving/stopped vehicles, various vehicle groups, etc.:

List of vehicles within GPS Insight's iPhone app

Choosing one will give you various information, to include a map of just that one vehicle (or choose “Map” to see them all):

Vehicle location within GPS Insight's iPhone app

Quick View lets you choose just a few vehicles at a time

And you will be able to set certain settings (right now they’re pretty limited):

Settings tab in the GPS Insight iPhone App

So that about covers the 2 new exciting features coming soon in January 2010. Based on licensing restrictions, both capabilities MAY have an additional cost, either now or in the future. If they do, it won’t be much, and chances are they’ll both be free to customers or cost the same as the existing mobile mapping capabilities.

Happy New Year everyone!

Rob.

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Dec 24 2009

Story about a city vehicle being used to sell drugs!

Category: Driver Accountability, Safety, detecting unauthorized vehicle usage — rdonat @ 6:35 pm

Just a couple weeks ago, I wrote about a Detroit city employee’s vehicle which had been used to BUY crack cocaine.

Now in Key West, FL, an employee was just arrested for selling cocaine, near a school or church, even!

We are seeing quite a few municipalities show interest and purchasing GPS tracking systems.

With problems like this, I can see why! We hear a lot of stories, but these two in the last couple weeks are pretty shocking.

Use GPS Insight! Know where your drivers are at all times! And let them know they’re being tracked. Then they won’t do this type of thing most likely…

Rob

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Dec 10 2009

Which of your vehicles has been to the crack house?

Category: Ad Hoc Reports, Fleet Tracking, Fuel Savings, GPS Insight Employees, GPSI-4000, Google Earth, Landmarks, Safety, Trimble, detecting unauthorized vehicle usage — rdonat @ 2:50 pm

I used to use this as a far-fetched example when talking about the benefits of retroactive landmark reports:

“Let’s say you catch one of your drivers buying crack at a crack house — don’t you want to know which others may have visited there in the past year or more?”

Well, in Detroit, they actually found a city employee’s vehicle at an actual crack house.

It’s detailed in this Automotive Fleet article.

So, now that there is a real life example of this, how would you use GPS Insight to easily determine the other vehicles which have visited that same crack house?

Here’s how:

First, find the exact location by looking at that vehicle/date/time and create a landmark with the convenient link from that point (we’ll pretend my house is a crack house).

First, run a 3D history map for that day (pretend yesterday):

Use GPS Tracking to find out who's buying crack with your vehicles

I’ll pick the “crack stop” at my house (really me coming home from taking the kids to Buffalo Wild Wings, a different kind of crack) and blur the street names in case anyone wants to come see for themselves — then I click on “Landmark: Create from Point”:

Pick a stop & create a landmark around it

Now I choose a Polygon landmark, change the color to green (why not?), and outline the areas a vehicle might PARK IN (not my house, which is a common mistake — you want landmarks to be where people park, not where the actual landmark is!).

I call it “Crack House.”

Now when I refresh my menu to pick up the new landmark under “Reports: Landmarks” I can run a 1 month at a time landmark report (note clicking the month name selects the entire month):

Run a GPS Tracking landmark report on a crack house in GPS Insight

Other than my wife & I, no other vehicles show up in December, so I go to November and see that a few other vehicles have been tracked in that exact area. Note the “Passing through” option which is checked — this means the visit will show up even if the ignition is not turned off while there (e.g. a drive by drug buy — my guess is crackheads like to idle too).

There was too much activity for my vehicle (with 3-4 devices), my wife’s & the company Scion (3 devices), so I created an “all but robs” group and ran the report against that:

Quickly create a vehicle group in GPS Insight

So Elliot and Ryan were in the crack house zone in November:

Elliot & Ryan at the crack house?

You get the idea. Obviously this is just a simulation — Elliot was dropping off a credit card we had forgotten at a restaurant the night before, and Ryan was dropping my wife off after her car needed service.

But what is important here is GPS Insight allows you to go BACK in time to check for landmark activity.

Several competitors do NOT (including two of the largest/oldest ones in our space). They will only allow you to report on landmark activity in landmarks which you created BEFORE the activity took place.

That means you would need to know all the crack house locations in advance! I hope our customers don’t have that information handy.

Although, I’ve often said you would have to be smoking crack to go with another solution…

Rob.

Tags: Fleet Tracking, landmark reporting, unauthorized usage, using vehicles to buy crack, Vehicle Tracking

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Oct 30 2009

Panic in Disneyland!

Category: Alerts, California, EZ-1000, New Features, Safety — rdonat @ 8:59 am

We added 10 second panic capabilities to our EZ-1000 devices yesterday. They have a “panic button” which can be pressed to send a message.

My boys have EZ-1000’s here in Disneyland so I thought I would configure an alert straight to my cell phone if they ever pressed the button (not that they ever were somewhere without us).

Within 20-30 seconds on average, it would “page” me that either “Mickey” or “Chip” (the 2 devices) had pressed the panic button.

This is NOT something we sell to people for their kids — but security firms do use them for their foot and bike/Segway mounted security guards.

Here is the alert:

Panic alert on a GPS Insight EZ-1000 GPS Tracking device

And here was the SMS text message I got when “Chip” pressed the panic button:

Panic alert on a GPS Insight EZ-1000 GPS Tracking device

Then a map shows you their location and using the iPhone, I can walk to them using the “blue” dot which is me (well, if you look at the time, I had actually done this earlier to figure out where they were at beforehand…):

GPS Tracking my kids on Tom Sawyer's Island

This is what might happen to a kid at Disneyland if they get lost on Tom Sawyer’s Island without a Panic Alarm capable EZ-1000:

Jack in Tom Sawyer's jail at Disneyland

Rob.

Tags: disneyland tracking, GPS Tracking, People Tracking

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