GPS Insight Blog » Landmarks

Jan 17 2012

It took less than 3 minutes to make my wife happy using GPS Insight

Category: Alerts,CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT,Driver Accountability,Landmarks — rdonat @ 4:28 pm

I was getting some work done today when my wife sent me this email at 3:35 PM:

Request from my wife to fix an alert

I bought a new car, so my old car (Rob 4000) doesn’t alert her like it used to when I set it up to text her automatically whenever I leave the office (blog article about that here).

I have a new car and new device (Rob 3900) and sometimes drive another car (Rubicon) now so instead of a single car notifying her, I thought I would do the following:

Make a group called “Robs Cars”
Change the Landmark Alert from a single vehicle (Rob 4000) to a Group of vehicles (RobCars) containing these 2 vehicles (devices)

So here’s how I did all that in less than 3 minutes (1 minute of it was just opening a window and signing in):

3:36:15 PM: I opened up Vehicle Administration to add a new vehicle group: [the screen capture program I use timestamped the files so that's how I can get the timeline easily]

Open Vehicle Administration in GPS Insight

3:36:27: I clicked on “Create New Vehicle Group”:

Create new vehicle group

3:37:02: Add the vehicles to the new RobCars Group

Add 2 devices (vehicles) to new RobCars group

3:37:24: Open the Alerts Manager:

Open the GPS Insight Alerts Manager

3:37:43: Open up the “Coming Home Alert” for edit:

Edit an alert in GPS Insight

3:37:56: Change the single vehicle “Rob 4000″ to the Group of vehicles “RobsCars”:

Change vehicle to a group

All done in less than 3 minutes:

3 minutes to make a change in GPS Insight

Now I don’t need to call my wife when heading home to see if she needs anything — she’ll get an email and text message every time now (again).

And because it takes just a couple minutes to make substantial changes within GPS Insight, I did it right away — just like our customers can make changes to ensure their alerts, reports, groups, etc. are always up to date. And if the system is easy to administer, it actually gets used properly and to the full extent.

If it only took me less than 30 minutes to fix up the images and write the blog article about it…

Rob.

Tags: ease of use, family, Fleet Tracking, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking, powerful alerts, vehicle tracking alerts

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Dec 05 2011

Landmark import now 40x faster in GPS Insight

Category: Landmarks — rdonat @ 2:21 pm

GPS Insight has always emphasized landmarks as a core capability of our GPS Tracking solution.

Landmarks are helpful because they make reports and real time location much more intuitive.

It’s easier for users to understand “Home Depot SW Phoenix” than it is “12525 W. Glendale Ave., Phoenix, AZ.”

But getting all your landmarks into the system used to take a lot of time (well, 5-10 minutes or so for a few thousand landmarks).

We spent some time optimizing this process so that large customers (or small customers with lots of landmarks) don’t need to wait so long.

We have made landmark spreadsheet import roughly 40x faster.

Now instead of 4 landmarks per second, you can expect over 175 per second (peaking to 200+).

Here are the results from today vs. 5 days ago (from our activity log):

Landmark Import in GPS Insight

If you need information on how to upload spreadsheets of landmarks, always feel free to call our support, or try it yourself here (it’s very intuitive):

Import landmark spreadsheet into GPS Insight

Enjoy!

Thanks,
Rob.

Tags: faster landmark uploads, Fleet Tracking, geofencing, google 3d earth landmarks, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps tracking software, gps tracking solution, gps vehicle tracking system, Vehicle Tracking

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Jul 29 2011

New Timestamps in Garmin Dispatch/Messaging Module

Category: Driver Accountability,Garmin Integration,Google Earth,GPS Insight Employees,GPS Navigation,GPSI-4000,Landmarks,New Features,New Features,New Garmin Features — rdonat @ 11:44 am

With our new timestamp functionality you can now check the time a Garmin Message or Dispatch Item (stop) was:

Sent by Dispatch or GPS Insight automatically or via text
Delivered to the Garmin
Viewed by the Driver
Accepted by the Driver
Marked as complete by the driver

Here’s how:

The other day I Dispatched myself by texting “gps rob dis robhouse” which is short for “gps [rob 4000] [dispatch] [landmark named robhouse].”

Here are the timestamps of each of the status changes (available under the “Custom->Garmin” menu):

View Garmin Dispatch Status Change Timestamps in GPS Insight

Note all I need to do is “hover over” the “Done” status at the end of the Message field, and the date-stamped statuses are visible.

After dispatching myself at 4:09, it instantly appeared as a stop on my Garmin.

I saw it, but then drove a bit so it would have a different timestamp when it became “active”, at 4:10, as I was about to turn North onto Scottsdale Road. Note the change to “Active” at 4:10. Here is where everything happened, after running a 3D history like this:

Run a 3D Map History for a day for my vehicle

Leaving Work, accepting a stop to go home

It took me until 16:18, and 5.8 miles to get home, where I was prompted by the Garmin to mark that stop as “complete” (we shorten it to “Done”):

Getting home and marking the stop as "complete"

Even if I didn’t mark the stop as complete, we still have the timestamp of when I reach that landmark available in the landmark report, and will eventually incorporate all of this information into a single “dispatch report” which allows our customers to get a single-stop summary of all their Garmin dispatch activity.

Here’s how to run that landmark report:

Running a GPS Insight Landmark Report

Note that our “1 day” landmark report extends backward and forward automatically to show you how long the vehicle was there prior to LEAVING (if it started the day in that landmark) and how long it stayed there through the end of the stop, if it was parked there at the end of the day. These are the kind of “nice to have” features our customers (and we) insist on, so we provide it.

You can easily tell I left (late for the day, really…), then forgot something, came back, then left, and eventually came back, precisely at the same 4:18 PM time I marked the stop complete via the Garmin interface:

Times in and out of my house, matching the Garmin "Done" timestamp

At least I left early the next day to make up for it — 6:22 AM.

This new capability is very helpful for proving service to a customer, determining how quickly your drivers react to dispatch items, and other investigations about your drivers’ daily activity.

Enjoy!

Thanks,
Rob.

Tags: Fleet Tracking, garmin dispatch, Garmin Timestamps, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps tracking devices, gps tracking software, Vehicle Tracking

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Apr 16 2011

New Landmark Stop Dashlet

Category: Ad Hoc Reports,Company Efficiency,dashboard dashlets,Landmarks,New Features,New Features,Reporting,Reports — rdonat @ 4:37 pm

This new Landmark Stop Dashlet helps you see how many visits your vehicles are making to landmarks and how long they stay along with averages.

This might help you to see your vehicles’ average visit times to loading zones/transfer stations/warehouses/customers/etc.

GPS Insight Landmark Stops Dashlet

You can modify which vehicle group, which landmark group, how many days you want to go back (1, 2, or 3), what you want to sort by, how many lines to display, and whether you want totals or averages to be displayed.

GPS Insight Landmark Stops Dashlet

This coming week will let you modify how frequently it auto-refreshes.

What is most convenient about this dashlet is you can click through to ANY landmark to run the corresponding landmark report instantly.

Click through to Sky Harbor Airport for a report

And instantly (.2451 seconds…) you get your listing of 3 vehicles which have passed through Sky Harbor Airport with detailed information — even what direction they were traveling (in the Distance column):

GPS Insight Landmark Report

As with many of our dashlets, this may not be necessary for many customers, but for some customers, it’s going to be a huge help in determining which landmarks are experiencing backups for the day and taking action.

If you like it, it’s under “Dispatch” and if you don’t, you can leave it in the Dashlet Dock.

Thanks,

Rob.

Tags: Fleet Tracking, GPS Tracking, landmark report, Landmark Stop Dashlet, Vehicle Tracking

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Apr 16 2011

New landmark report and MASSIVELY FASTER LANDMARKS!

Category: Landmarks,New Features,New Features,Reporting,Reports — rdonat @ 12:20 pm

We have MASSIVELY advanced our landmark report speed. Large customers will now be able to run month-long landmark reports with ALL VEHICLES and ALL LANDMARKS (although typically they’ll want to use a group of vehicles and a group of landmarks).

I will illustrate on GPS Insight’s “fleet” of 30 or so vehicles (with multiple devices in several vehicles).

We have over 2,000 landmarks defined.

This new report is called the “Landmark” report on the Reports tab of the interface:

Run the new GPS Insight Landmark Report

Then it starts to run and shows you in real time its progress:

Landmark Report Status as it computes

HUGE report spits out in 211 seconds the first time you run it:

Report Completes with Summary Information at top

Bear in mind we quantified 9270 landmark visits across 32 of our 87 defined devices during the month of March in 3 1/2 minutes.

Here is what the detail looks like for my vehicle (only showing the first few landmarks):

GPS Insight Landmark Report detail

This is a LOT of data, of course. You can choose whether or not to show the “passing through” points where the vehicle doesn’t actually stop or idle, and also can group by landmark rather than by vehicle (click on the blue landmark column heading).

Once you’ve run the report once for a set of landmark visits, subsequent runs take half as long typically. Re-Grouping takes less than 2 minutes for almost 10,000 lines of report data:

Landmark visits grouped by landmark vs. vehicle

This significant advancement opens up many other possible enhancements, such as the Landmark Stop dashlet which I will detail in my next blog article.

Most competitors let you run ONE vehicle for all landmarks or ONE landmark for all vehicles.

Not ALL for ALL (or group for group).

This is huge to people who don’t want to run the same report 100 times if they have 100 vehicles (or landmarks).

We think Landmarks are very important so we constantly improve GPS Insight’s ability to use them effectively and throughout the product.

And best of all, it’s a free upgrade (as always)!

It’s still in “Beta” so bear with us while we clean a few things up here & there, but it will be completely ready within a week or so – I just couldn’t wait to talk about this significant upgrade.

Thanks,
Rob.

Tags: Fleet Tracking, fleet tracking system, GPS Tracking, landmark report, New Features, signficant upgrade to landmarks, Vehicle Tracking

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Apr 16 2011

Automating ‘I’m coming home’ messages to avoid calls while driving

Category: Alerts,Arizona,GPS Insight Employees,Landmarks,Safety — rdonat @ 11:15 am

Most days I leave work around 5:30-6:30 and call my wife to let her know I’ll be home in 10 minutes or so (nice commute, huh?).

I typically call her on Scottsdale Rd., which is busy, and it’s obviously distracting to do so. I shouldn’t be calling people while driving (nor should your drivers be).

I am finally just going to automate an email/text message to her which tells her I’m leaving the office between 4-7 so she’ll have a heads up (e.g. I can pick up a kid from baseball, get home in time to eat with everyone else, etc.).

You can do this for any landmark arrival/departure in an effort to make fewer calls and be proactive about telling someone you’re on your way/arrived/etc.

This is SUPER-EASY to do in 1 minute and may save me from getting into an accident or getting a ticket for talking on the phone while driving.

Here’s how you do this in GPS Insight:

Choose Account: Schedule: Alerts:

Open GPS Insight Alerts Admin Area

Add a Landmark Alert:

Add a Landmark Alert

Then customize the particulars:

Only my vehicle (Rob 4000)
My wife’s email AND cell phone (note this is a true SMS, not an email to an @txt.att.net, so you don’t need to know the carrier)
Only during weekdays between 4 PM and 10 PM
All day during the weekends (so she knows when I’m heading home all day Saturday/Sunday)
Only when I LEAVE (not enter) the landmark “GPS Insight Headquarters”

How to customize a Landmark Alert

Then it instantly starts checking, once per minute:

Alert is running now to notify my wife when I leave work automatically

Just to make sure the landmark definition includes where I would normally park, I’ll check that also:

Ensuring the landmark is accurate to where I park

Now when I leave, an automated text and email will go out to home, letting them know I’m on the way (e.g. save me some dinner…).

And I won’t need to be distracted on the road while heading home any longer.

Rob.

Here’s the first message, within a minute of me leaving the office:

"I'm Coming Home" Alert through GPS Insight

And the stop report to back it up:

Rob leaves the office at 5:35 and the alert is delivered at 5:36

Rob.

Tags: cell phone usage while driving, coming home alert, Fleet Tracking, GPS Tracking, landmark alert, safe driving, Vehicle Tracking

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Jan 09 2010

Dashboard Maps now include Landmarks!

Category: dashboard dashlets,Landmarks,Mapping,New Features — rdonat @ 11:45 am

We have recently added the ability to view a single group (or all) of your landmarks within GPS Insight’s dashboard maps.

Here is how you do it:

Click on Edit (the pencil icon) then choose your group of landmarks, and click “Apply”:

Including landmarks within GPS Insight Dashboard Maps

They show up in both Map as well as Satellite/Hybrid views:

Including landmarks within GPS Insight Dashboard Maps

Large landmark groups are not allowed due to typical browser limitations. If you need to include more than 500 landmarks, GPS Insight’s GPS Fleet Tracking 3D Mapping is the way to go and can handle thousands, probably even tens of thousands depending on your PC.

All users have access to this convenient capability. Please be sure to use it!

Thanks,
Rob.

Tags: gps fleet tracking, gps insight map dashlet, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking, landmarks in dashlets, map dashlet, new capabilities

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Dec 10 2009

Which of your vehicles has been to the crack house?

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

Comments (1)

Nov 29 2009

Counting & Reconciling Tolls using GPS Insight fleet tracking

Category: Ad Hoc Reports,California,CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT,Driver Accountability,Google Earth,GPS Tracking,Landmarks,New Features,Reporting,Reports — rdonat @ 2:47 pm

We have a customer in San Francisco who wanted to be able to reconcile the # of trips they make across the Bay Bridge (since they pay a toll when coming into the city).

Here is a picture of the landmark they defined (along with a nice 3D representation in Google Earth):

GPS Insight Landmark of the San Francisco Bay Bridge

We added a “Passing Through” option to our standard landmark report to help with this requirement. Before this, the landmark visit would have required the vehicle to either stop or idle for a minute to register. If you click the “Passing Through” checkbox, it will count any activity through that “zone.”

GPS Insight landmark report adds "passing through" option

Now when running the report (which took less than 3 seconds), you get each time a vehicle went through that area (I’ve blurred out the vehicle names for customer privacy).

GPS Insight vehicle tracking landmark report

This makes it easy to see that 7 vehicles went a total of 23 times across the Bay Bridge.

But how many tolls is that?

You only get charged on the way INTO the city. Exporting that report to Excel gives us some additional information such as heading (what direction the trip took through the landmark). So only Southwest trips should incur a toll. That shows 8 of them according to this Excel Screenshot:

How many tolls should we be charged across the Bay Bridge?

We added Heading as well to the exported version of the report. Since space isn’t at a premium in Excel, we usually put all columns into the exported versions of the reports there.

This helps our customer, & I thought it would be worth detailing here in case other customers can think of a good use for this.

Thanks,
Rob.

Tags: bay bridge, GPS Tracking, landmark report, san francisco, toll collection

Comments (1)

Nov 15 2009

How much time in the NASCAR pits? (we use GPS tracking devices to find out)

Category: Ad Hoc Reports,Arizona,EZ-1000,Google Earth,GPS Insight Employees,GPS Tracking,Landmarks,People Tracking,Reporting,Reports — rdonat @ 10:14 pm

We were lucky enough to get a couple passes for this weekend’s NASCAR event, to include pit passes to the garage & pits.

We had a couple of EZ-1000′s with us, and I want to show how easy it is to quantify how much time we actually spent in the pits (vs. the stands/box):

I first create a landmark called “PIR Pits” around the pits:

tracking activity in the NASCAR pits

Then cut & paste the PIR Pits landmark into GPS Insight:

Paste a geofence into GPS Insight

Paste here:

Paste geofences into GPS Insight

Confirm here:

Paste geofences into GPS Insight

Run a report here:

GPS Track of Pit activity at NASCAR using GPS Insight EZ-1000's

1.9 hours in the pits

Except that missed the part where we went really close to the “inside the building” chatter from the GPS device, so I had to carefully re-draw the polygon to get a more accurate picture of the true time spent down there.

So even though we may pick up a little bit of false “in the pit” activity since it’s so close to the box/grandstand (with drift due to the device being enclosed), this adjustment to the “pits” will give a better representation of how much time was there:

Extend the boundary of the pits geofence to get all activity

While we get a couple of random “1 minute” visits which are inaccurate due to the EZ-1000′s “inside” drift, the 2.8 hours is much more accurate than the original 1.8 — both Brent and I spent half an hour in that remote area of the pits and it makes a big difference to the total amount of time in the report by accurately creating the polygon:

2.8 hours in the pits

A fun (and loud) time was had by all:

NASCAR in Phoenix

And a favorite of mine, the RedBull 83 car:

RedBull NASCAR

I like this car so much I bought the $60 model for my bookshelf. Brian Vickers may have come in 38th today, but we drink a lot of RedBull and don’t have much use for Lowe’s in our office.

Rob.

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