GPS Insight includes the ability to group vehicles and assign shapes to them, and also color-codes them based on what their activity is.

Now that works on most mobile mapping platforms – but NOT on the iPhone, which isn’t up to date yet

Additionally, we reduced the length of the URL you need to type (once) to get to your vehicles on GPS Insight on your smart phone.

Here are some screenshots:

Here is a list of your vehicles — scroll and choose one to drill down to see it on the map:

New Shapes, Colors, and Directional Arrows in Mobile Maps

Viewing many vehicles, most stopped > 1 hour (red) at GPS Insight headquarters.  No idea what Google thinks “House Hangout” is.

Lots of stopped vehicles at GPS Insight Headquarters

Note that now we show the direction of travel on the phone as well with an arrow:

One moving up in Seattle

Clicking through gives more information:

Detailed information about a vehicle

If you are a GPS Insight user, here is how you access the administration area to create your unique URL which you can then use to see current locations of your vehicles on your phone running Google Mobile Maps (most phones):

GPS Insight Mobile Map Administration

Enjoy!

Rob.

One of our employees who drives our GPS Insight Scion in a car pool took it Saturday morning to a remote area of the desert to go for a run.

He parked off the road, on a pull-out which was nowhere near where cars drive.

He came back to this $90 parking ticket (with my name on it since it’s my car officially…):

$90 ridiculous parking ticket

So here’s how you prove that Maricopa County Sheriff’s are scrounging around for money for our broke County, using GPS Insight:

Quickly run a 3D vehicle history for the Scion for that day

Open the “Time Slider” to the first trip of the day & show just the dots (green) on the map corresponding to the drive to the first stop and 45 minute stop (yellow):

History shows the drive to go to an early AM run

Then Zoom down & see the vehicle was parked off the road itself:

Parking off the road yields a $90 ticket

Then go to Street View mode & see that it’s a paved pull-off.  Why wouldn’t it be ok to park there to go for a run/ride/hike?

Did they pave it just to lure people in to give them $90 parking tickets?  Thanks Deputy Thompson.

Street View shows this is nowhere near the road

I’ve paid it since it’s got my name on it, but I will definitely send a copy of the blog article to the Judge & see if we can get it refunded.

How ridiculous, though.

Even though politics and a County with financial issues trumps GPS evidence sometimes, at least you can clear the suspicion that your driver did the wrong thing.

Also, using our DriverID, you know which driver was in the vehicle at the time of the ticket so you know who to talk with, if the original got “lost.”

Rob.

My wife loves the fact that she’s a guinea pig and has a GPS tracking device in her car… (not really)

But it comes in handy really often to know where she & the kids are.  This article shows how quick and convenient it is to use GPS Insight to answer real questions in a useful way, daily.

I was heading out of the office, waiting at the light to head to the store, and a car that looked like hers drove by toward our home.  All the cars in Scottsdale look the same and all the windows are tinted, and we don’t have a vanity license plate I can remember (which probably is the way to know it’s my car…).  I wasn’t sure if it was her heading home from somewhere or just one of the other thousand SUV’s in town.

I thought maybe she would want to turn around and grab dinner with the kids where I was going.

But I didn’t know if it was her car or not, so I pulled out my iPhone & checked the map of all our vehicles.

Within seconds, I knew it was her, thanks to the GPS Insight fleet tracking product.

Here’s how I did it in 10 seconds:

I simply refreshed the link for GPS Insight’s “Mobile Maps” then “zoomed down” to my location using the “zoom to me” button (I don’t know what it’s called, but I have an arrow pointing to it below).  Clicking on the vehicle just North of the intersection shows it’s my wife’s vehicle (Nav2):

Quick map tells me it was my wife (Nav2) who just drove by

Then just to show I’m really at the light waiting to turn left, I click on the pin there (I have 2 devices in my car so both are me):

Me at the light waiting to turn left

Then I can show where the cars & the office are using Google Maps’ street view (by pressing the little orange guy shown above):

Google mobile Maps shows the intersection where I'm sitting, etc.

This isn’t life & death or even business, but gives a good illustration of how fast you can answer questions about where people are at (or perhaps which of your techs just blew a red light in front of you a second ago).

10 seconds, and you’ve got your answer.

Rob.

After our new “Late Arrival Alert” was launched last week, we got some feedback & changed it a bit to make it easier to read.  The time it SHOULD HAVE TAKEN is now shown (e.g. “…taken less than 6 min.” in this alert).

new alert additions

Additionally, a map is now shown for the start/end points which generated the alert, so you can easily see the context of the alert.  We embed maps in all location-based alerts (e.g. odd-hours, speeding, etc.).

This alert was generated because I took 18 minutes getting from my house to the office today, since I took “the long way” to stop by and pick up something at a convenience store.

This caused me to take 18 minutes vs. 6 to make it the 4.5 miles to the office from my home, and trip this alert.

Here’s a map of the “out of the way” route I took to get to work today (just to get a few things done before I head out of town for the week):

extra stop at a convenience store

You can see the way the red line starts “thin and light” and gets “thick and dark” with the direction of travel, which makes it easy to see the activity at a  glance.  I clicked on the yellow “pin” which shows all stops less than 60 minutes.  It shows I stopped for 1 minute.

The red pin down at the bottom is my car stopped for > 1 hour.

It’s Sunday & I’m heading home now to hop in the pool & get ready for my trip, but wanted to show off this new alert functionality first.

By the way, here are the 2 alerts I got which now are “obsoleted” by this alert — I had one for every time I enter/exit either home or work — now I can see ONLY when I get to work when it’s too long of a trip. (not that I really need to track myself — it just makes for good examples when showing our functionality to customers):

RobHouse & GPS Insight Headquarters arrival alerts

Rob.

Although our iPhone app works, the iPad gives us many more capabilities, so we will be developing an app for it soon.  In the meantime, search the app store for “GPS Insight” and download it for free.

The first screenshot for the iPad app is shown below:

GPS Insight iPad App coming soon

There is a lot of potential for this app, so please let us know what would be convenient for you, and we will make sure to consider it for inclusion.

Thanks,

Rob.

We have new Mapping and Dashlet functionality for users of touch-pad devices such as the iPad and iPhone.

Touchpad clients such as the iPad and iPhone do not allow the same “drag and drop” or “pan” capabilities as a mouse and a browser, so we had to make a few additions.

The new scroll arrows allow you to easily move through a Mapping Dashlet. Clicking the middle square button will zoom to fit the vehicles on the map, or vehicle/group that is shown within that map (such as the “WEST” group here):

New Scroll Arrows

We added a new arrow “popup” which allows you to move Dashlets around within your dashboard. Click up, down, left, or right and the Dashlet will move accordingly. To access this feature just click on the icon.  Then to close it, click that icon again.

New Arrow Popup

Here is an example of the new navigational features on an iPhone:

New Features on an iPhone

Bear in mind that on an iPhone, the main product is functional, but you will need to zoom/pan around since the resolution is pretty small.  On an iPad you will still need to zoom a bit in order to ensure your finger “clicks” the appropriate icons/vehicles, etc.

We also added a new feature to the Dashlet Dock, called “Add-Dashlet”. You will now notice a plus sign (+) to the right of each Dashlet name. Clicking the plus sign will load the Dashlet. Originally, to add a new Dashlet you would have to drag and drop. Now both options are available.

Dashlet Dock with new "Add-Dashlet" functionality

These new features are available to everyone, but were added specifically for touch-pad users. If you have a suggestion for a new feature or for a specific device, please let us know.

Thanks,

Rob.

We now offer a new option to “hide” Vehicle Labels on all Dashlet Maps. Simply open the Dashlet edit settings by clicking on the pencil icon, find “Vehicle Labels” and then choose “None” from the drop-down menu. By utilizing this new option, you can avoid extra clutter on the map, especially when viewing a large number of vehicles.

Select "None" from the Vehicle Labels drop-down menu

Below are examples of the same mapping Dashlets with and without labels:

Following Vehicle Dashlet

Mapping Dashlet displaying large number of Vehicles

Mapping Dashlet displaying specific Vehicle Group

We also allow the vehicle icons to be clicked, which will then open up an information box. To remove the box, just click on it.

Click on Vehicle icon for information box

Vehicle information box

This new feature went from “customer request” to “in production” in just seven days! Always feel free to give us a call if you have a suggestion for a new feature by calling 866-477-4321.

Thanks,

Rob.

We have finally received “approval” from Apple so our new iPhone app (version 1) is available to anyone with an iPhone running OS version 3.1.3 here:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gps-insight/id376128487?mt=8

Here are some screen shots:  Bear in mind you’ll need your login & password to make this work for your account.

See lists of your vehicles with colors to represent their status

Pick a single vehicle to see details about it

Use our "Quick View" to see only the vehicles need to right then

Then show them on a map & zoom down/use Satellite Mode

This is just the first version of the app, and we have much more planned for both iPhone and iPad (as well as Android and Blackberry, depending on customer requests).

Please download and play around with it for your account.  It is a free app.

Be sure to give us a good rating!

Thanks,

Rob.

I finally received my 3G iPads today for myself & a few developers (and my wife…).  The iPad is VERY cool.  I’ll still stick to my Kindle for reading (minimally my constant emails will distract me from the Kindle App), but everything else will be iPad.

Using GPS Insight on the iPad works pretty well.

Here are a few screen shots:

GPS Insight dashboard, reports, maps, & landmark creation screens on the iPad

The dashboard allows you to run reports, click to zoom into specific vehicles, minimize and delete dashlets, as well as edit properties:

GPS Insight dashboard on an iPad

Edit dashlet properties within GPS Insight on an iPad

Running and clicking through reports, creating landmarks, and several other capabilities are all supported natively.

Right now you can’t add or move dashlets, since that requires a “drag” action which isn’t really available on a touchscreen Apple device.

So we will add functionality to allow customers to do that — a simple click event on the available dashlets, as well as arrow buttons on each dashlet and map will help to fix that limitation of these devices.

I’m not sure how many of our customers use iPads (we’ve had several requests for support though).  They should be happy once this is complete (maybe by the end of this week).

We also have an iPhone App which is installable through iTunes — we haven’t gotten it on the App Store yet, but it’s a simple install if  you want to contact us for a copy.

Here are a couple more screenshots of GPS Insight on the iPad (note this vehicle is parked slightly outside the landmark — easy to adjust though, with or without an iPad):

GPS Insight mapping on the iPad

Editing a complex landmark within GPS Insight on the iPad

Let us know how you like using the iPad within GPS Insight.

One tip: set up your dashboards in advance, then choose between them on the iPad — it’s easy to pull up several saved dashboards.

Thanks,

Rob.

This is a REALLY exciting report, and is the culmination of months of work on top of years of getting ready for this report.

>>> REALLY — It’s A BIG DEAL <<<

This suite of reports will essentially pinpoint your inefficient drivers on an overall as well as a trip-by-trip basis.

Here’s a an early version (the final reports are on the way & will also include an overall vehicle-by-vehicle comparison/summary):

Run the Efficiency Summary Report:

New GPS Insight Trip Efficiency Report

Up comes a graph showing all your drivers’ trips for that period of time (a work week in this case) & how efficient they are relative to both SHORTEST and FASTEST routes which we determine WOULD HAVE BEEN IDEAL:

GPS Insight Trip Efficiency Graph

Then looking at the detail, we pick on the top “most inefficient” driver (sorting on # of unnecessary miles beyond the fastest route from A to B):

GPS Insight Trip Efficiency Detail

Then hovering over an entry, it tells us that the “James – Garmin” vehicle went 34.2 miles, but only needed to go 19.03.

Difference between actual and ideal fastest route

By clicking on the 3 entries, we instantly pull up the actual (pink), shortest (red), and fastest (blue) routes for a visual comparison:

Visual Representation of Driver Inefficiency

In reality, the “turnaround” out of the way is where several of our employees meet to car pool every day:

Reason for inefficient driving is a carpool drop-off

So this behavior is all right, since it saves a lot of miles and cars on the road.

But look at #2 and #3 on the list (and there are countless more inefficient trips):

Driving way out of way (in Purple) to get from A to B

Driving way out of way (in Orange ) to get from A to B vs. fastest/shortest routes in blue & red

These are our employees & our own cars, so it’s not exactly the end of the world that we’re sometimes driving all over the place inefficiently, & we have our reasons.

But if you run this against your fleet, you will find drivers who:

• Get Lost
• Make Wrong Turns
• Intentionally Take the Long Way (padding hours)
• Literally Drive In Circles (and should be probably be fired for fraudulent wasting of fuel/mileage and padding of hours)

This report will be available in late May, and is going to surprise a lot of customers.  And probably a lot of drivers too.

It will save our customers a HUGE amount of money on drivers they didn’t know were this inefficient, or were specifically defrauding them of labor hours.

Additionally, it will be available in June as a real-time alert to supervisors as well as drivers to “coach” them on better ways to complete their trips when they do so inefficiently.

Oh, and by the way, on a slow development server, for all 50 of our vehicles for a full work week, that report only took 1/3 of a second to run:

FAST (.36 second) Report

Look forward to it soon!

For more information on our main GPS Fleet Tracking Reports visit our website.

Thanks,

Rob.

From our support page:

We just added several new reports so that you will know which of your DRIVERS (not just vehicles) were associated with certain activity:

Drivers Are Now Shown in Most Utilized Reports

Driver-to Vehicle assignment information is now shown on the majority of our most utilized reports and maps.

(If you’d like to learn more about Drivers, please read Driver-to-Vehicle Mapping!)

The Driver was previously an option to be shown in dashlets on the website and to be listed in the Activity Detail Report:

Map and Location Dashlets

Activity Detail Report

The Driver information has been newly added to four more reports:

Begin/End of Day Report

Drive Time Summary Report (It replaced the VIN on this report.)

Run Time Report

Stop Detail Report (It appears only in the exported spreadsheet version of this report.)

GPS Insight allows you to assign drivers 5 different ways:

• Web Interface
• Automatic DriverID fob/reader
• Garmin login capability
• SMS Text Message from driver “assigning” himself/herself to the vehicle
• Application Programming Interface (API) to allow your systems to automate the assignment of your vehicles to your employees

This makes reporting much more useful if your drivers aren’t always tied to the same vehicle.

Rob.

New “Magnifying Glass” Toggles between Pan and Zoom on 2D Current Map

2D Current Maps have a new feature that allows custom zooming and re-centering of the map to a chosen area. Clicking the new “magnifying glass” icon, underneath the zoom-level tool, toggles between panning and zooming functions on the map.

When zoom is selected, you can drag a box around a specified area to quickly zoom in to that location.

You can then make a box around another area to zoom again, if needed, …

…to get to the zoom level you prefer:

As always, the middle mouse scroll wheel allows you to rapidly zoom down & back out.  Double-clicking and double-right-clicking will also zoom you down/up one level at a time.

We’re always working on making the mapping better, easier, and faster.  As always, your comments and suggestions are welcome.

Thanks,

Rob.

Now if you have Garmin integrated into your GPS Insight implementation, you can optimize a list of addresses or landmarks, then send that entire route via wireless to your driver’s Garmin on his or her dashboard.  It’s this easy:

Route a Set of Addresses to a Garmin as well as Add Landmarks to a Route

A route made from a list of addresses, and some landmarks, can be sent to a Garmin. Using the Route Dashlet, addresses can be pasted to create a list of destinations that are not yet landmarked:

Additional destinations for the route can be added from the list of landmarks on the account:

An optimized route is then created by clicking Get Route:

The Route is sent to the specified Garmin by selecting the vehicle with an attached Garmin and clicking Send:

If you would like to look at the route, you can click on “Map This” to show it on a map and adjust/email it if necessary:

Once you “Send” the route to a Garmin, the NUMBERED stops show up with the Route Name for you to easily determine where to go and in what order. You may call them “Monday,” “Tuesday,” etc. in order to help distinguish. Note that they should not be a very long name since Garmin screens aren’t always wide enough to show the full name (as in the case with my small, inexpensive Nuvi 205).

Here are screen shots of the Garmin when it receives the route:
The “Stop” icon shows up and the Garmin “dings” to let you know you have a new stop (or multiple stops).  Click on it to show your stops in numbered order:

Then, you can click on the one you want to go to (ideally in the order specified, or based on whichever one is closest to your existing location (which is shown in the right column) [note I had to edit the image since my nuvi didn't have enough space for the full number -- why you should buy a W model (which stands for widescreen)]:

After clicking on it with your finger, you get more details, and can choose to “Go” there at this point:

At that point, the Garmin will take you there with turn by turn audible and visible instructions. If you have a Traffic enabled Garmin, it will optimize for existing traffic.

Note that addresses, latitude/longitude, and Landmarks may be combined within the GPS Insight route dashlet.

This is a real time-saver and using GPS Insight to get the route order optimized will absolutely save you miles — 5-10% is reasonable, and more if your dispatcher really doesn’t have a way to visualize the order on a map.

Down the road, we will start allowing customers to save routes & compare the route SENT to the actual route DRIVEN.

Bear in mind that the GPS Insight GPSI-4000 and newly introduced GPSI-3900 are our 2 Garmin capable devices.

Click for more information on our Garmin Integration.

Rob.

Obviously I am pretty dependent on GPS for just about everything when it comes to getting around [also for money...].

I have 3 GPS Navigation devices with me when I drive my car (factory installed, Garmin, & my iPhone) so I never print directions any more.

So, on the way out to Long Beach a couple weeks ago, my family and I took our 3 month old car with Ford’s/Microsoft’s “Sync” system (with GPS Navigation).  No directions, just our factory installed GPS navigation unit.

Just outside of town it crashed on us.  I figured out how to do a factory reset and get it back up & running.

Here’s the point:  AFTER RESETTING IT, I FORGOT TO TELL IT “FASTEST” & NOT “SHORTEST” when optimizing our route.  DOH!

We took the 10 out to LA area, but then it took me through some really sketchy, slow-moving areas.

On the way home, I thought about it, & realized I needed to change my GPS setting to FASTEST from SHORTEST.

I was curious how much longer it took me time-wise to get there than to get back, so I ran a 3D history report & saw very quickly that it was twice as long (60 vs. 30 minutes):

Run a week long history for our trip to/from Long Beach

Slow, direct route vs. Fast, indirect route

All I had to do is look at the 2 points where the route deviates then converges again, and compare times and distances:

Where I took a GPS dictated "dumb turn"

The times/mileages are:

Going there: 17:47 & 4571.6 miles to 18:53 & 4602.5 miles

Coming back: 10:26 4618.8 miles & 10:58 & 4656.3 miles

Doing the quick math, it took 31 miles & 66 minutes there the “short” way, & 37.5 miles & 32 minutes (half as long) the “long way.”

So to save 6.5 miles, I wasted 34 minutes of my life, praying we didn’t get car-jacked.  At least if we did, I would know where the car went…

Anyway, I thought of this the other day & was curious just how much extra time it took us because of that one GPS setting on my (Factory Installed — not GPS Insight…) navigation device.

Because I track that vehicle, it took me about a minute to figure it out using GPS Insight.

Oddly enough, while I was writing this, my new Microsoft Windows 7 box crashed Google Earth as well.  It knew I was badmouthing Microsoft.  Sooner or later, all things Microsoft eventually crash.

I’m really glad we don’t run our systems on Microsoft products.

I just checked and our two “primary” servers which our customers rely upon (with lots of auxiliary and backup servers, of course) have been up for two years to two years & 3 months:

GPS Insight servers run for years without incident

I’m glad most of our competitors run Microsoft though…

Rob.

We have an SMS query capability which allows you to see the driving distance between a vehicle & an address, a landmark, or another vehicle.

It is documented at http://support.gpsinsight.com/wiki/support/sms_query_documentation under “Driving Distance.”

You just text “gps [vehiclename] distance [address | landmark | vehicle name]

It just came in handy for me while my family & I were driving in California.  I mentioned we were close to our office and my wife asked how close it was [we drove right past...  We're going on vacation this week].

I didn’t know the exact name of the landmark we have for it (GPSI – LA) so I just SMS’d our 477-477 (GPS-GPS) short code with “gps nav2 distance gpsi” — nav2 is the vehicle we were in.  The return SMS told me the list of valid landmarks meeting “GPSI” — GPSI – LA was the one I needed so I sent it again, & it showed that I was 12.1 miles away, a 25 minute drive:

Use GPS Insight SMS Queries to see how far it will take you to drive somewhere

We got close — within 4 miles of the office.  But I’m on vacation, so we just kept on going…

Driving by close to the GPS Insight LA Office in City of Orange, CA

So close:

Driving by the office on the way to vacation

Great way to show how useful SMS Queries are for our customers though — they are an optional, but highly useful capability.  We use them ALL THE TIME ourselves.

Click for more information on our GPS Vehicle Tracking Mobile Access.

Rob.

Keir finished the Atacama Crossing “4 deserts” race — 250 km across the Chilean desert.

We tracked him using a GPS Insight TT-1900, and here is the track of his entire journey:

GPS Track of Keir Oxley finishing a 250 km race in Chile

Here is a picture of him crossing the finish line:

Picture of Keir Oxley finishing a 250 km race in Chile

He finished in 64:13:23

Congratulations Keir!

Rob.

Keir is still hiking across the harsh Chilean desert as we speak, tracked with a 5.9 oz. satellite tracker in his pack.

Keir hiking across the Chilean desert

Not to be outdone, I covered 40 miles today in the harsh wilderness myself, with only the assistance of 20 ski lifts, gravity, 2 skis and a couple of beers:

Ski tracking in Deer Valley at Park City UT

Just kidding, obviously a lot harder to walk 20-some miles across the desert than ski around a bunch.  Maybe I should invite Keir next time…

Rob.

I’m on a vacation at Park City Utah, and I have a new app for my iPhone called Navionics. It lets you see where all the ski trails are, and search for them, as well as track your own trail.

It’s got great features, but is a shining example of how inaccurate phones are for tracking purposes.  The “pins” are GPS Insight, and the little yellow “O”s are my Garmin Edge 705.  The red line which goes off the mountain then back at the top of the lift is the iPhone based tracking device.  I did not go over the side of the mountain, trust me…

GPS Insight vs. Cell Phone Tracking

It’s a nice app nonetheless – here are a few screen shots:

Ski trails on Navionics

List of trails you can choose to see in NAVIONICS

Highlighting a single trail in NAVIONICS

But when you take the inaccurate iPhone “track” which NAVIONICS provides out of the map, you can see that GPS Insight (light blue) and the Garmin 705 (red) are both very accurate.  The GPS Insight EZ-1000 was set for 1 minute updates, and the Garmin is about 10 seconds between points.  The big difference is the EZ-1000 transmits its location every minute, and with the Garmin (meant for bike riding), you need to upload the data when you get back to a PC.

GPS Insight vs. Garmin to track snowboarding

The speeds even match up pretty closely:

snowboard speed using GPS

Note that this view (from the Garmin website) shows both speed AND elevation (so you can see I went on the long run 4 times, & smaller runs 5 times through the day):

GPS Tracking snowboard activity & speed

That was enough to kill my newbie snowboarder legs, so I’m taking today off & have plenty of time to write about it…

Rob.

We just added a couple nice new capabilities to make it trivial to create a map on the GPS Insight dashboard by dragging and dropping either a single vehicle or the name of the group up at the top of the dashboard.

Just be careful to move dashlets by dragging on the RIGHT side of the title bar now (or you’ll create a map accidentally).

Here’s a quick video which shows how to do it:

Thanks,

Rob

I took my  boys (7 & 9) skiing (snowboarding they correct me every time…) up to Flagstaff AZ this weekend.

I brought my Garmin Edge 705 (a Garmin for bikes, basically) & put it in my coat pocket to get a really good feel for where we went during the weekend.  It logs every 10 seconds for eventual upload (vs. once a minute in real time for the EZ-1000 I brought along as well).

Garmin EDGE 705

They are really nice, and we don’t sell them — I bought mine at the bike shop.  [We do sell Garmin's for vehicles and can integrate them with our GPSI-4000 GPS tracking solution though...]

The Garmin is an optimist, and thinks I ran up all those hills & burned 5248 calories in the process (had I brought the wireless heart monitor it would have known better):

Garmin's interpretation of my Skiing with my kids

This is a great image of GPS Insight vs. Garmin (bear in mind we are an “ACTIVE” tracking system whereas the Garmin is “PASSIVE” and needs you to upload the data eventually):

GPS Insight vs. Garmin for ski tracking

The “pins” are EZ-1000 points [every minute while in cell coverage, which is spotty on the mountain].  The yellow circles are Garmin points (a LOT more of them).

Here is the Garmin unit track of where we went (and where I remembered to turn the unit on…):

Skiing at Snowbowl in Flagstaff AZ

It’s nice to have that for sports usage.  But if you want to track your vehicles in real time, that’s not an option — you need an active tracking solution like GPS Insight. Both are great products — just for entirely different needs.

And here are my cold kids.  Lots of snow this weekend, and way colder than they’re used to living in the desert.

Rob's kids in their cold-weather snowboarding attire

Rob.

Recently a prospective customer asked us to add a “half-height” map. We did that within a few days (as well as a 2x, 3x height map).

When using it though, I thought it took too long to use the menus to choose the right vehicle, etc.

I decided it would be really convenient to allow the user to “tear off” a vehicle from a location, alert, etc. dashlet.

Now you can just drag & drop ANY VEHICLE from any dashlet onto the dashboard to create an instant half-height “follow this vehicle” map:

Drag a vehicle to instantly create a half-height "follow this vehicle" map

As soon as you drop the “map” icon which is displayed, that vehicle is now displaying in a map which follows it, and shows all of the vehicles from the group associated with the dashlet you dragged it from (this was a complaint from the prospective customer about their current vendor — this type of map only showed the single vehicle):

Instantly create 5 maps just by dragging 5 vehicles to the dashboard

We let you show up to 8 maps per dashboard window.  This took me 2 seconds per moving vehicle to create these maps using this new capability.  We will start allowing other drag & drop capabilities on the dashboard now that we’ve started to use this type of functionality.

Really convenient!  Remember, if you want to keep this particular layout, you need to save it or save as in the hierarchy save tools:

Save your Hierarchy Changes!

As usual, if you have any tips or requests for new capabilities or ideas, please let us know!

Thanks,

Rob.

We recently made some new enhancements to our Dashboard Maps.

Now you can size them in any of 4 heights (and the width is determined by the dashboard style you choose).

Additionally, we allow you to display 8 maps per window now, vs. 4. You can still open as many windows as your PC is OK with.

In addition, we now allow you to “follow” a single vehicle, and display ALL the vehicles around it (determined by which vehicle group you choose).

Here is a screen shot of 3 “half-height” maps which are all “following” a different vehicle (noted in the title area of each map):

3 "Follow me" half-height maps in GPS Insight's Dashboard

These are only the right-most column of the full dashboard, which has a “twice-height map in the middle:

New multi-height maps within GPS Insight

You can choose which vehicle or vehicle group to SHOW, which landmark group to DISPLAY, which vehicle or vehicle group to FOLLOW, and which zoom level to use.  Additionally, the same Map Group choices apply so you can “tie” these maps to the other various dashlets (e.g. location, alerts, landmarks, etc.).

As always, click on the “pencil” icon at the top right of the map dashlet to open the edit settings screen which looks like this:

GPS Insight Map Dashlet Settings

Make sure to save your dashboard here:

Save your changes to the GPS Insight dashboard!

An upcoming enhancement will allow you to simply “tear off” a vehicle from a dashlet to automatically show that vehicle in a “follow me” map, which will make it quicker to create these ad-hoc maps for vehicles you may have a short term interest in following closely.

View our GPS Vehicle Tracking Features for more information on what we can do.

Rob.

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.

I lost my keys the other day which is awesome. I think they’re in a toy chest somewhere courtesy of my daughter.

So today after we rolled out a new improved Driver-to-Vehicle mapping product, I grabbed a new DriverID at work and put it on my (new) keychain.

I forgot to “log in” — we do however support mandatory login using a really obnoxious buzzer which goes off after 30 seconds until you press the driver ID button to the reader.

So after dinner, I decided to test everything for myself. Since I’m not the only person who will lose a DriverID or their keys, we made sure to make it easy to give out & assign new driverID’s.

After my drive, I logged in and launched the right administrative screen where we see 3 unassigned driverID buttons — one has been used in my car (Rob 4000) and has today’s date and a recent time.

Assign a new DriverID button within GPS Insight

So I choose my previously defined Driver record with the drop-down:

Assign a new DriverID button within GPS Insight

So then we run an activity detail report for my vehicle for today to see the driverID switch. My “wife’s” driverID had been recently assigned to my car, so the change was very apparent. (I quote “wife” not because she’s not real, but she doesn’t really use a driverID — she might be more colorful than some of our customers’ drivers about telling me where to put my driverID if I asked her to use one…)

Run a GPS Insight GPS Tracking report to show a new driver assignment

So here’s the switch — exactly when I took the car for a quick spin around the neighborhood:

Run a GPS Insight GPS Tracking report to show a new driver assignment

And here is my path with my name now in the Driver field within the information bubble:

New DriverID assigned to my vehicle after losing my keys

After working diligently lately, we’ve streamlined this process as much as possible for as many use case/problem cases (e.g. drivers losing their keys…) as possible, and it’s trivial to reassign a new driverID to a driver now.

I wish we tracked keys though…

[Side note, I found them today, 1/24/10, finally, outside by the hose, rusted after a couple weeks of sitting out in the rain, but the car door openers still work...]

For more GPS Insight features, please see our GPS Vehicle Tracking Features page.

Rob.

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.

A big customer of ours wanted their sales vehicles to be able to pull up where they have been for the past 30 days.

This is so they could “eyeball” where they have been within their territory & how recently they’ve been there, where they’ve stopped, etc.

Here is where you can go to get this new functionality now:

30 Day History Map within GPS Insight

This will show my vehicle’s location for the past 30 days, plus today. We color the vehicle’s history from yellow to green, and with thin lines representing older activity, thicker lines representing newer activity.

Then we show the full “today” line in Blue (thin-to-thick indicates the time of travel) and the link updates every minute.

We limit this functionality to a single vehicle since it is pretty computationally intensive, and since the purpose is for the driver to run it for his or her own vehicle on their laptop with an aircard.

The yellow lines are “older” activity, & the thicker green lines are more “recent” activity. The Blue lines are the current day’s activity and the red dot is the current status, along with information which shows up when it is clicked:

GPS Insight 30 day history plus current status map

If desired, the stops themselves can be displayed by “opening” the time slider on the top right:

Viewing stops within GPS Insight's 30 Day History/Current Status GPS Tracking map

This is available for all of our customers with access to 3D Mapping using Google Earth.

It’s mostly useful if you’re driving around, trying to figure out where you HAVEN’T been in the past 15-30 days — perfect for salespeople who need to cover a territory and do a lot of driving around, looking for customers.

I’m sure other uses for this capability will show up — as always, let us know if you need a slightly different version for your exact requirements.

Thanks,

Rob.

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

There are 2 MAJOR additions coming in January.

1. We will release our Posted Speed Limit Report late this week or early next week
2. 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.

My 4 year old daughter Sarah got a Disney Princess jeep from Santa Claus on Christmas (along with a liberally applied Tinkerbell makeup kit, earrings and much much more…).

GPS Insight tracks Princess Sarah

Never missing a chance to track something important, I covertly put “Rob 1000,” a GPS Insight EZ-1000 in the battery compartment:

GPS Insight tracks Princess Sarah

So off, we go. When we get to the corner, I check the location on my iPhone & it shows we’re there:

(I’ve blurred the street names):

Tracking Princess Sarah

Here’s a picture of her at that intersection:

Tracking Princess Sarah on Christmas

A quick 3D history report:

GPS Insight 3D History GPS Tracking map

… and here’s our 20 minute walk around the neighborhood. Per usual, our 3D mapping starts “light & thin” and gets “darker & thicker” so you can see the direction of travel is clockwise around the neighborhood easily, just by looking at it (or by the times which are at 1 minute intervals): [by the way, blue = idling, e.g. zero MPH, & green = moving]

Princess Procession on Christmas Day

She wants a faster car though already…

Princess Sarah wants a faster ride

If there’s one person I’ll break the “we don’t track kids” rule at GPS Insight for, it’ll be Sarah when she’s ready to drive (especially at the rate she’s applying her Tinkerbell makeup).

Ok, here’s one more bonus picture of my Princess:

Sarah on Christmas

Rob.

We will have a formal announcement about this after the holidays.

Just last Tuesday, we lit up exactly 1,000 new units on GPS Insight for a new customer.

They all came online at the exact same time, which is not typical, but this had an interesting and noticeable effect on our daily processing.

Here is a graph we get each day which is typically 100% bell curve shaped. This indicates driving activity, and peaks during the middle of the day when most of the drivers of our tracked delivery vehicles, service vehicles, and government vehicles are out doing their jobs.

GPS Insight turns on 1000 new units

It was very evident when these devices started reporting to GPS Insight, so I thought I would point out the nice “bump” we got to our overall vehicle installed base Tuesday.

It is interesting to note that even though we have vehicles in 4 different timezones (6 if you include Alaska and Hawaii), and in 100 different types of business, they all wind up “smoothing each other out” to a single bell curve.

The street sweepers and a number of over the road/long haul vehicles work at night typically, which keeps our nighttime activity from dipping too low, and the early morning service workers (Construction, typically) get things off in a hurry starting around 4 AM MST (here in AZ this time of year that means 6 AM New York Time). The longer tail at the end of the day is because of overtime — drivers get going according to a schedule, but don’t always finish on time.

Some drivers drive to a workplace once a day, then there is no more movement until they leave to go home, and some drive all day long (e.g. delivery vans). When you you put together tens of thousands of vehicles though, across over 1,000 customers, things balance out and become pretty predictable.

GPS Tracking histogram / Bell Curve

Here’s a daily “by hour” for the whole month. The only anomaly is a slight dip in the 11:00 hour — I’m pretty sure that’s lunch related. I bet if our customers check the street view on their vehicles locations, there would be a lot of this stuff going on:

This is our Scion 4000 on the way to take a couple salespeople to the airport to head home after a week in the office:

19 minute lunch stop into the 11:00 Hour

In-N-Out stop for Joe Vidmar

Our Chicago guys only get into Scottsdale occasionally, and needed their In-N-Out Burger fix before heading back on Friday. Them & several other thousand drivers being tracked by GPS Insight around lunchtime. And now 1,000 more.

Rob.

So I have 2 back to back soccer games today and while the kids are off warming up, I thought I would figure out how to write a blog post from my iPhone using a new app I downloaded.

I have to keep if about GPS so here is a screenshot of my location under the tree and my car’s location in red with the length it’s been stopped.

Jack just stopped 4 shots on goal. I should probably watch the game now…

Afterward, they had the obligatory pizza party:

Soccer Pizza Party

And how much time did we spend there, and at the games prior? Just run a quick (1.8 second) stop report for the day.

GPS Tracking stop report for soccer activity

Easy to see — 3 hours, 9 minutes at the games, 1 hour, 3 minutes at the party, and 17 minutes prior to the games getting snacks for the game at Target

By the way, the iPhone app for the blog is not very good. I had to use a browser to move the pictures around, and the sizes aren’t ideal. Oh well, I should probably be watching the game instead anyway.

Rob

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.

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.

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.

I decided to take my 9 year old, Jack, to Camelback mountain yesterday. I was curious how much longer it would take than the last time I went.

I brought an EZ-1000 & here is a picture of our hike, which was 1:30 up, & :56 down:

Camelback Hike with a GPS Insight EZ-1000 Tracking device

Here is a picture of Jack at the bottom:

Camelback Hike with a GPS Insight EZ-1000 Tracking device

Here was our location, courtesy of the iPhone (blue dot) and the EZ-1000 which had reported just a few seconds earlier:

Camelback Hike with a GPS Insight EZ-1000 Tracking device

And 1:20 later, at the top:

Camelback Hike with a GPS Insight EZ-1000 Tracking device

With sweaty Dad:

Camelback Hike with a GPS Insight EZ-1000 Tracking device

And one of Jack’s shady cave — he found a few of them on the way up & down to rest in:

Camelback Hike with a GPS Insight EZ-1000 Tracking device

It took a little longer this time (last time 1 1/2 hours, this time 2 1/2 hours). But my heart didn’t feel like exploding as much as when I was in a hurry. Plus I had some company. Much better this way.

Rob.

My kids went trick-or-treating the second we got back from Disneyland yesterday. Jack is wearing the skull face, and Ryan is the headless horseman. Sarah is the Alice in Wonderland.

Rob's scary and cute kids

(Look at the arrow on Jack’s shirt below) Just like in Halloween 3, the movie, there was something REALLY scary — truly frightening — lurking underneath Jack’s Skull costume. I had no idea until I saw it later.

YIKES! (shudder...!)

Ryan had enough battery left in his EZ-1000 to track him trick-or-treating around the neighborhood so I could stick with Sarah on her first Halloween:

Halloween GPS tracking with an EZ-1000

Rob.

There is a feature our customers sometimes require, where they can show a subset of their vehicles’ location to THEIR customers.

We call it “Customer Sites” and here is a good example of how it works:

I created a site called www.gpsinsight.com/disney in about 30 seconds just by configuring the “disney” group to show up publicly:

Tracking our drive back from Disneyland using GPS Insight's Customer Sites

This view only tells you current status & speed (or time stopped) but is useful, and worth mentioning here. It shows our vehicle (Navigator) as well as my 2 kids’ EZ-1000’s (Chip and Mickey).

It’s my wife’s turn to drive so I’m just catching up on email & thought I would check to see where we’re at using this site I set up so a few people could see where we were at in Disneyland over the past couple days.

Here’s a picture of Ryan with Goofy for good measure (note the GPS Insight pen for autographs!):

Goofy with Ryan at Disneyland

Rob.

Apparently the hard 57+ mile “day” (40 hours allowed) of Keir’s Sahara race is over. Here was yesterday’s GPS track. Our device which only reports every 1 hour shows 48 miles, but he really went 57 — this is because of the “as the crow flies” way we’re determining distance. Our vehicle tracking devices (vs. satellite based asset tracking devices) don’t have this issue — they are as accurate as an odometer.

Hard part done with the Sahara Race

Now it’s just 10 more miles to go — apparently they do this so most competitors can cross the finish line roughly at the same time. He’s still in 70th of 95 competitors. (125 started & 30 have had to leave the race)

Here is a total track of how far Keir’s gone, using the lightweight Satellite tracking device in his pack (with yesterday standing out):

GPS Tracking of Sahara Race

Congratulations Keir!

Of course, my wife, kids, & I probably walked close to that long yesterday at Disney:

People Tracking at Disneyland using GPS Insight EZ-1000

Our dogs are barking!…

Rob.

We headed to Disneyland today with the boys (Sarah got her own “Princess” trip with Mommy to Disney earlier in the year):

Jack & Ryan after riding the "California Screamin'" rollercoaster

I put a couple EZ-1000’s in the boys’ pockets in case they got lost and to document our day.

Originally they were labeled Goofy & Dumbo but my boys took exception to that. I called Tech Support and within 2 minutes Adam had them changed to Chip and Mickey (per my kids’ wishes).

Here’s a picture of our first day at California Adventure, then Disneyland. (There’s a cool time lapse video of this at the end of the blog article):

GPS Tracking at Disneyland

They tracked like a charm for the entire trip from Scottsdale at 1 minute updates. No kids got lost or ran off with Goofy.

I decided it would be a good idea to walk home to the hotel. Apparently I was wrong, and had to carry Ryan on my shoulders most of the way (fun).

I got to measure it afterward — only .57 miles, but it felt like longer after walking all over Disneyland:

Walking home from Disneyland at the end of the day

Here is a video of our walking around for the day:

disneyland

Rob.

My Brother in Law Keir Oxley is half-way through the 162 mile long Sahara Race.

He’s in 70th place (they started with 125 and are down to 96 at this point).

Here is a shot of their route so far & all of the base camps they’ve had:

GPS Tracking in the Sahara Desert

I think our Driver Efficiency Report would have something to say about their route of choice…

Here is a screenshot of Egypt & the tiny area they’re in, which is a 75 mile trek covering 30 actual miles so far:

Tiny area of Egypt the race takes place in

And here are the rankings — Go Keir!

Racing the Planet Sahara Race standings for stage 3

Rob

A customer just sent us a picture of how they show GPS Insight on a big screen in their office & I thought I would share it:

GPS Tracking on the big screen using GPS Insight

Here is an iPhone (e.g. no flash…) picture of the 52″ LCD in the lobby of what we track here at GPS Insight:

GPS Tracking on the big screen using GPS Insight

I’ll put a Facebook group out there for our customers to upload pictures of their dispatch & we’ll see if people are interested in sharing this type of thing. The Grand Prize goes to one of our customers which puts dueling 120″ projection screens out there — one with 2D mapping & one with 3D Mapping. Pretty impressive. I’ll ask if they can send a picture.

Rob.

I guess my assumption that they would have a destination (e.g. the Nile River which was 162 miles away from base camp) was invalid. In the past 2 days, my brother in law Keir has been on a race through the Sahara, but they are just running around a track with no real direction:

Running around the Sahara

They’ve only gone 16.6 miles away from base camp, although they will have finished up with 49 miles of racing by the end of today (probably a couple more hours).

Today is a 28 mile day and a half hour ago Keir had gone 21.1 miles, as the crow flies, with one hour updates, which understates mileage by probably 8%. This means he should be done in the next 2-3 hours hopefully.

Tracking Keir across the desert with GPS Insight GPS Tracking

I’ll keep putting tracks up on the blog for interested people (e.g. Keir’s relatives…).

Interesting to see this type of tracking though — it is not the typical “where’s my driver” stuff.

Rob.

I was curious when Keir, my brother in law racing 162 miles across the desert, would get started today, so I put an alert on his tracking device and built a quick geofence around his “base camp.”

GPS Tracking Geofence around Egypt Base Camp

Then I created an alert to let me (and his wife/parents in law) know when he got moving in the morning (down to the hour — the device only transmits to the satellites every hour since it costs around $.25 per “ping” and it probably doesn’t matter much to us which exact route he takes through the God Forsaken Desert):

Geofence Alert for Keir's Satellite Tracking Device leaving Base Camp

Then I got the email (I didn’t send myself a text message since it would wake me up in the middle of the night):

It went off at 12:14 AM local time, and Egypt is 9 hours ahead of us so they must have started between 8 and 9 AM local time. Here’s the alert I received:

GPS Tracking alert

And a quick image of his trek so far — I think they do 26 miles a day (a marathon a day until they do 162 miles). He had done 19.7 miles so far today so far, and is averaging around 2.6 miles per hour. That means a couple more hours I would imagine.

Hiking across the Sahara Desert with GPS Insight satellite tracking

Makes me tired just thinking about it. Actually, I think I’ll go for a run this morning, but a lot shorter and a lot cooler than this one.

Rob.

My brother in law Keir Oxley starts a 162 mile race across the Sahara tomorrow. (This is the same brother in law who almost got me killed scaling the wrong part of Camelback Mountain 15 years ago…)

Here are 2 pics from the last race:

Egypt Race tracked by GPS Insight

Egypt Race tracked by GPS Insight

He wanted to be able to “show” the family and friends his progress and asked for a tracking device. We have a perfect one for that, the TT-1900 (we don’t really advertise it much — it’s a tiny version of the TT-2000/2100).

He needed it light, battery operated, and satellite capable.

We programmed one up for 1 hour updates, and sent it to him.

I gave them a login & password, but didn’t want everyone in the world using it, so I also created (using “customer sites“) the following link: http://www.gpsinsight.com/egypt — it took 1 minute.

For iPhone & Google Mobile Map users, they can “search” and see Keir’s location by entering/refreshing http://gps-i.com/k/oxley/1778.kml

Anyway, this is a pretty interesting new use for GPS Insight devices. The TT-1900 is intended for container tracking and is waterproof, heat-proof (well, we’ll see how it works in the Sahara Desert…), and works on satellite networks across the world.

It only weighs 5.9 ounces so it won’t be difficult to lug 162 miles across the desert over 7 days. It’s rated to 212 degrees F & Keir said it was 122 today — 90 F to spare.

GPS Insight Satellite Tracking unit TT-1900

I’m guessing they’re hiking to the Nile river — it’s exactly 162 miles from where they are right now, & they start soon.

Hiking across half of Egypt being GPS tracked by GPS Insight

Keir is doing this A) to prove he can do it and B) to raise money for poor African schools — if you are interested in saving schools from being destroyed by elephants by helping to purchase a fence for them, feel free do so in Keir’s name here: http://www.asanteafrica.org/donate.html#online

If you feel compelled to buy GPS Tracking devices for your company based on your love for Keir & his cause, we’ll donate 10% to Asante Africa.

Have fun & be safe Keir!

Here is a link to Keir’s online blog from the race — they have an opportunity to use satellite internet to update this once a day.

Rob.

We just finished up at the TruckIT conference in Dallas yesterday. I had a high value package to send and wanted to know when it had been picked up by UPS.

So I put an EZ-1000 in the box (it was a nice new LED TV).

Here is how I quickly was able to create an alert to page me the minute that box left the hotel:

First I pull up 2D Mapping which has a convenient link to create a landmark from a vehicle (TV’s) current location:

Alerting me when UPS picks up a package using GPS tracking

Here I click the “Landmark: Create from point” link:

Click a link to create a landmark

Here I expand the radius to 1500 feet and save the landmark as Renaissance Richardson (the hotel we were at):

Create a landmark in GPS Insight

Now I can open up the Alert Manager and create a geofence alert for when that box leaves the area:

Create a GPS Tracking alert in GPS Insight

Choose the “New Landmark Alert” link:

Create a Landmark Alert in GPS Insight

Choose the EZ-1000 (named Demo), then name the alert “UPS Picked up TV” and enter my cell phone, and last choose the new “Renaissance Richardson” Landmark and change the “trigger” to “Outside”:

Vehicle Tracking alert (Geofence/Landmark)

I waited a couple minutes then hovered over the alert information icon to see that it had been checked 4 times (once per minute is standard):

GPS Tracking Alert

At 12:36 I received a text message on my iPhone telling me the package left that landmark:

Receiving a landmark alert in GPS Insight

Reading the alert, we see that the Demo device (in the LED TV box) left Renaissance Richardson at 12:35. The alert name is “Ups Picked Up Tv”

GPS Insight Landmark Alert

It’s been a couple hours since I got that alert, so now I can look to see where that UPS driver has gone since he picked up the TV (or if it was stolen, where they took it…):

GPS Insight history using GPS tracking device in a TV box

GPS Insight history using GPS tracking device in a TV box

I should put an alert out there now to let me know when it gets to our office in Scottsdale so someone doesn’t take it home before I lock it away for the next trade show…

Rob.

GPS Insight has made it easier to get your Dashlet maps exactly how you need them by introducing “Map Groups” to the map-aware dashlets.

You can assign each map and each dashlet a letter A, B, C, or D.

Then whenever you click on a vehicle name, the appropriate map will display that vehicle’s location.

When you set it up, it looks like this:

GPS Insight Dashboard Maps

The way to “assign” a map to a dashlet is to choose the Map Group Letter for both the map and the dashlet, like shown below:

GPS Insight Map Groups

Now you can “tie” your dashlets to certain maps, and choose your groups accordingly.

In the graphic above, we have 4 different groups chosen, and they are each tied to a map nearby, so you are able to view your various vehicle groups separately but at the same time.

Every map-enabled dashlet has this capability now — here is a screenshot of the “Closest To” dashlet & where to make that configuration change.

REMEMBER TO SAVE YOUR DASHBOARD AFTER MAKING THESE CHANGES OR YOU WILL LOSE THEM!!! (I just did that — oops)

Save your GPS Insight Dashboard changes

Rob.

I took my 2 boys to Navy Pier while traveling to Chicago last week.

We went on the Seadog “Extreme” which is a fast powerboat ride on Lake Michigan. I had an EZ-1000 on me so I was able to see how fast we were going from my cell phone on the boat. Here is a Google Earth 3D Map of that activity

40 MPH is about as fast as it got according to the EZ-1000.

Here is a pic of the Seadog Extreme from my iPhone:

And my boys enjoying the fast ride:

This was Friday, so one of our developers noticed I was out on the lake & texted to see what I was doing. Then he saw I was waiting in line for the ferris wheel & he bumped my refresh rate to 15 seconds so he could see the altitude rise and fall while we were on the ride. We don’t show that data (too much information…) so I had to trust him when he said it worked. Then I asked him to drop the refresh rate to 2 seconds for the swing chairs. It got a good set of points & they all agree the speed for that ride was between 14-19 MPH:

The swings at Navy Pier:

And each of my boys again:

This is Ryan:

This is Jack:

Fun time for the kids (and Rob).

Incidentally, I was curious how long of a trip they take you on with the Seadog, and using Google Earth & the Measurement Tool, it’s simple to see that it’s about 10.5 miles after they get past the breakwater:

Thanks,

Rob.

I took my kids and wife to see Wicked (the musical) last weekend at Arizona State.

It was hot. 118 degrees hot.

The play was good, but my kids wanted to walk over this bridge to leave afterward, which left me confused on where I had parked my car. The heat was melting my brain.

So I pulled up the vehicle location on my iPhone using our Mobile Map application:

The blue dot is my iPhone & it told me that my car was East of me. That’s all I needed to know, but didn’t necessarily know what direction was East (Gammage is a big round spaceship looking building so direction is not immediately apparent).

The new iPhone has a compass built in — perfect. I wish I had this when I was in the Army:

So I head East & see my car and note that it’s in the 6th space:

Looking at the iPhone in satellite view & zooming in, we show I’m in the 5th space, as well as where I am when I pull this up out of curiosity:

So then we get going & even after 10 minutes of driving, it still shows as 118 degrees. Note that the AC & the seat coolers are cranked as high as they can go…

We were in a hurry since the play was really long and our babysitter needed to leave at 5. Unfortunately at one point I saw we were in Mesa and I realized I missed my turn, costing me 7.42 miles while I drove the wrong direction.

I was a little preoccupied trying not to burn myself on the steering wheel, etc. to notice I had passed up the 101.

Apart from it being insanely hot, and my missing my turn to get home to the babysitter on time, it was a great day — This is my second time seeing Wicked & it’s a fantastic play (The Wizard of Oz from the Wicked Witch’s perspective).

My 7 year old son Ryan had this to say: Wizard of Oz – 1 star. Wicked – 4 stars. He’s hard to please but Wicked worked better than a 70 year old movie apparently.

Rob.

I decided to hike Camelback Mountain today — I’ll try to make this short (shorter than the 1 1/2 hour hike up & down the toughest mountain I’ve done in the Valley).

I couldn’t remember where to go so I looked it up on the internet & then dispatched myself via my Garmin from my PC:

Then I created a landmark as well, while I was at it (note I put the “route me here” address where it should go, but then I outlined the whole mountain) :

Then I routed myself there with my Garmin by wirelessly dispatching my vehicle’s Garmin to that location:

Turns out it was the wrong entrance — I go to the other one typically, so I drove around aimlessly finding that, plus the REI sports place where I bought a new water backpack (called a Camelbak, coincidentally…) .

Running an efficiency report, I ran 58% more time and 20% more miles (since the miles I went extra were on surface streets, not highways, this makes sense):

Here is my driving around aimlessly, wasting time & fuel (green dots, vs. blue “optimal path”):

Then I get to Camelback, and send a couple SMS notes when I start, get to the top, then get back to the bottom:

Here is my track of the 1 1/2 hour climb to the top and back (using an EZ-1000 at 10 second updates):

Here is an iPhone picture of me at the top, mapping both my iPhone GPS location (blue) and the EZ-1000 location (red pin):

But here is the good part:

Toward the bottom:

And at the top:

I’m a little sore after the 1 1/2 hour long trek up & back down, but the view is worth it.

And I even wore a GPS Insight hat…

Rob.

We just exhibited at GFX (Government Fleet Expo), organized by Eric Bearly at Bobit, which was a great show with 500 attendees.

Whenever we go to a show, we have a big 52″ LCD at our booth. To rent a cheap 50″ which has poor resolution typically would cost us $950, which is nuts. So I usually buy a new one at Best Buy for less than double that instead and store it in the closest office/friendly person’s home for use in the next local conference where we exhibit.

Well, my TV just went out at home, so guess what? I get this one.

But shipping them is a nightmare, since they sit on a dock & stand a pretty good chance of getting stolen.

So I stuck a GPS tracking device, an EZ-1000 in it (someone called the device Telemundo, Spanish for TV, I guess…)

When I was at the Airport, I was able to confirm that they picked it up using my iPhone like this:

(Here is how to take a screen shot with an Iphone — hold down the round application button & press the top power button.)

So I knew it made it off the dock and to a transfer dock to be shipped to my office (and then my living room…).

I was surprised to see they flew it, and our 900 lb trade show booth from Denver to Salt Lake City, then to LA. Hopefully we’ll see the TV on Monday, and then I can watch TV again.

Here are a few more screen shots of how I was able to track the TV on the way from the trade-show:

I clicked on Get Directions to see how far it was, thinking they were driving it (but it’s being flown apparently):

Note that it’s at LAX Airport right now.

While it’s in the air, we don’t receive GPS or transmit location, since the plane blocks the GPS signal, but this is pretty good for determining roughly where a TV is. We are working on a different product which is better for determining an asset’s location, even if it’s well inside a truck/structure. But for now, we stick to vehicle, and the occasional TV headed for Rob’s living room, and this does the trick. If it had wound up in a dockworker’s home, we would have been able to send police pretty easily.

We only sell EZ-1000’s for business use, such as for security patrols/bike police, etc., but those security-oriented customers occasionally use them to track things like this, & I’m glad we have this capability ourselves. We also use them as easy demo units, so if you want a very quick proof of concept, charge one up, stick it in a vehicle or two’s drink-holder, & you’ve got a tracking proof of concept without having to do an install (which still is only typically 15 minutes or so).

Rob.

So yesterday I took my 9 year old son, a friend and his son to the Diamondbacks game (they lost…). Thanks to Mike Greco at bluemedia for the tickets…

On the way home, after dealing with the 101 being closed (Arizona doesn’t know how to work on roads without closing them entirely), yours truly got pulled over 2 miles from home after punching it to make a stale yellow light. In my defense, there was no one around (except the police officer apparently, who I never saw).

Anyway, I got pulled over shortly thereafter and was informed I did 67 through the light in a 50. Oops.

I haven’t had a ticket for 15 years, so there goes that streak.

I got home shortly thereafter & guess what, he was right.

My GPSI-4000, which takes speed samples once a second, got me doing 68.

Here’s a picture which pretty much tells it all:

Here is my idle stop while receiving the ticket:

I pulled over near a community’s entrance to get over from traffic:

I brought an EZ-1000 with me for my son to hold on to at the game in case I lost him, & it was set for 10 second updates.

It got me at 67 MPH going through the light too (and shows I immediately slowed down):

So, the moral of the story is: I was speeding. It was literally for just a few seconds to catch a yellow light rather than slam on the brakes and wake the kids up (that’s my story), but both the police AND my GPSI-4000/EZ-1000 caught me. FYI, the GO-3000 is equally accurate, and our 3500 lineup checks speed every 20 seconds, so it catches speeding, just not the rapid up & down speeding like I exhibited yesterday — it got me at 62 MPH. To put it in perspective, many of our competeitors check speed once every 5 minutes and don’t report max speed — just instantaneous. We report max, instantaneous, and average, and this is detailed in several “speeding” related blog articles.

On a less depressing note, we had a nice time at the ballgame, and stopped at Alice Cooper’s Cooperstown before which we tracked on the EZ-1000. I landmarked it while I was there by sending a text message of: ‘gps rob 1000k landmark cooperstown’ so now it shows up here like this:

A quick landmark report shows we were there for 41 minutes:

41 much more worthwhile minutes than sitting on the side of the road waiting for a ticket 2 miles away from home.

I’ll let you know how traffic school works out.

Now that I think about it, had I been using my new Garmin routing capability I would have been directed to take the shorter path home after getting detoured, and would have avoided this ticket altogether… Grr…

Never mind all those other light green speeding dots where thankfully there weren’t any police or speed cameras.

Rob.

We stopped sending Email Alert maps a little while ago in order to revamp them [we wanted to send one map with all that alert's activity, not multiple maps with each email].

Now whenever you receive an email alert for speeding, idling, or odd-hours activity, it comes with a map to show you where that activity is occurring.

Here is an email I just received about Tony speeding through the desert on his way home from the Memorial Day Weekend:

Note the attached .png map:

Sorry to pick on you Tony. I’m sure it’s 75 MPH there & you’re only 9 over so hopefully they don’t go after you for this…

Here, I’ll pick on myself driving home from the previous article’s trip [does the 5th amendment protect me against a ticket if DPS reads this article? At least I only averaged 58 the whole time.]:

Notice how the alerts are 20 minutes apart? That’s because I don’t want to be alerted continually, just occasionally.

I open up the alerts page, then look at the alert by hovering over the “i” for information:

It’s been checked 370,151 times, and I’ve been alerted 600 since I created that alert.

Opening the properties, we see where it’s set to only send every 20 minutes if the alert condition continues:

Before these changes, there would be one .png attachment for every red dot in the map. With more customers choosing to use 1 minute updates and 20+ minute alert frequencies, you can see why we changed this…

Since many customers have blackberry’s and/or iPhones, smartphones, etc., now if you get the alert email to your phone, you can see the inline image to get a feel for where the alert is occurring as well.

Maybe you can go meet the driver yourself to discuss it…

Come to our main website at www.gpsinsight.com for more information about our alerts and maps.

Rob.

GPS is very accurate, but still not 100%, especially for civilian/commercial purposes.

Typically, when a vehicle is moving, we get it within 5 feet of accuracy.

When a vehicle sits still for some time, tracking devices (all of them) typically experience “GPS Drift” of up to 25 feet or so.

However, GPS Insight fixes and insulates our customers from this inaccuracy and I will show you how in this article:

This is what GPS Drift it looks like using a version of our mapping which only our support staff has access to — this particular map shows how long each individual point takes to make it into our database, and also shows every single reported point, and I use it make this “GPS drift” evident:

These are roughly 24 points which bounce around up to 25 feet from the center (they are 30 second updates for 12 minutes while my wife & family waited for me to get a few things from the office on our way home tonight):

All of these points were in our database within 4 seconds of them being registered by the GPS device (in this case, a GPSI-4000 at 30 second updates).

However, we “consolidate” them into a single, highly accurate 12 minute idle stop, which shows precisely where we parked the vehicle and let it run for 12 minutes — the parking lot is practically empty and we parked in the 2nd space:

To show what our customers see, I run a typical 3D history map to compare:

And we only see one “pin” where my vehicle truly parked for 12 minutes:

Note the “lighter/thinner” red line from earlier in the day (where I drove through the ATM at the bank to our North earlier). We show activity in this way to help easily determine direction and time of travel with the “path” which exists below the individual location “pins” which we show.

Here I have zoomed out a bit, and we see this 2 minute idle stop (at the ATM drive through), 5 1/2 hours prior to coming back to that area (it’s a long drive to Tortilla Flat):

The light/thin to dark/thick lines are another way we help customers gain easy insight into their fleet activity.

Here is my vehicle (Rob 4000) and Brent’s — it is immediately apparent by looking at the line thickness/color what direction of travel I took to the office, then back home (by way of the post office) today. It is trivial to see that Brent drove in the direction of travel from light/thin to darker/thicker.

These are the types of things which you might not immediately notice with GPS Insight. Things just “work” the way they should. But behind the scenes, we are processing and filtering and consolidating and sanity checking millions of points per day for our customers to make sure they see sensible data and can use that to bring efficiency and insight to their businesses. We take advice on usability from customers all the time, and encourage them to provide feedback to help better the product.

I just happened to run a map tonight for a different reason (we were testing a different unit) and I noticed this idling activity. I thought it would be a good time to detail how we do these two (of many) convenient map enhancements for our customers.

By the way, here is an iPhone pic of where we were at with the kids (’Tortilla Flat’ — an old mining town/tourist trap in Apache Junction):

It is a beautiful area near the Superstition Mountains — we thought the drive would be nice on this Memorial Day weekend. I’ve had better food before though…

Note the hitching post where people tie their horses up when they can eat at the Saloon.

We don’t have GPS or diagnostics for horses, and note they left different types of “emissions.”

Rob.

GPS Insight now offer switches to its customers using the GO-3000 and GPSI-4000 models of tracking device.

These are useful if you want to count and quantity where certain activity takes place, such as:

• solid waste collection (tipping a can into the garbage truck)
• pump activity (pumping a well, concrete, etc.)
• street sweeper on vs. off activity

There are countless uses for switches, and we will go through them in future articles.

Here are some pictures of the new capability within GPS Insight for a residential solid waste operation which recently put GPS Insight on its vehicles. These are the “sideloaders” for the day (which pick up curbside cans):

We have a new “All Inputs” option for what to show in 3D Mapping — the path of each vehicle is shown in a different color, but the actual pickups are shown as green or blue dots with stars (depending on speed):

To isolate JUST the pickup activity or JUST the driving activity, put a polygon in place to show the dots like a cornrow, or turn off the time slider to show just the path:

But if all you want to do is count “tips” just run a summary report — here is the how:

Zooming in:

All in .28 seconds. Lots of information, and quick, easy, and relatively inexpensive to obtain. We have other reports available which we will go into with future articles (e.g. idling when PTO is NOT engaged, etc.).

Now when Mrs. Smith at 123 N. Main Street says you didn’t pick up her garbage on time, you’ll know what happened.

Rob.

So we sent a team to coordinate some installs in Santa Monica last week. Since Google Earth makes city boundaries available, it’s not hard to quantify when we were there, and how much time was spent in Santa Monica and what stops were made in neighboring cities. This takes no time at all in GPS Insight. Here’s how:

First, turn on City Boundaries, turn off roads (to make it easier to see the city boundary) and then “fly to” Santa Monica:

Then trace the outline using a Google Earth Polygon and name it “Santa Monica” and color it however you may like:

To be precise while tracing the city boundary, you can Zoom Down/Up, and pan around using the Pg Up/Pg Down and Arrow Keys ( Help -> Keyboard Shortcuts gives you this information) – just click all the defining points until you complete the polygon:

It’s up to you how accurate you want to be — 1 minute and you should be 99.9% accurate:

After clicking on “OK” you can then right-click/cut [or copy to be safer -- either is fine] the definition from Google Earth and paste it into “Quick Import” under Mapping -> Landmarks on the GPS Insight top navigation bar:

T

Then click on “Import Now” and repeat for any bordering cities in question.

To find out which ones we need, grab the history for roughly the time that vehicle (Scion 4000) was out in California.

I forget when they were there so I’ll just grab 9 days or so toward the end of April:

It looks like they spent some time driving through Venice, having breakfast in Playa Del Ray, and in WestWood, Sawtelle, Culver City, etc.

I’ll just add a couple other cities for the sake of this article, but if these were important county or city boundaries, you would only need to add them once, and if it was a LOT of data, we have ways of automating this for our customers — just ask! [sometimes that means we do it for you...]

Here are 3 I quickly traced (they’re not 100% — there are crazy in & out borders which are irrelevant for our purposes here):

Now we can group them as “CA Coastal Cities” under GPS Insight -> Mapping -> Landmark -> Groups:

Click on “Create New Landmark Group”:

Then name it and save it:

Now here’s the timesaver:

Draw a quick “throw-away” polygon around all three in Google Earth and cut/paste it into “Filter by Polygon”:

We quickly see only our 3 Coastal Cities — this is down from 966 landmarks we would otherwise need to look through to find all three and drag them into the new group we’ve created:

Now shift-click between the top & bottom to select all 3, then drag onto our new “CA Coastal Cities” group:

Now click on the “edit landmarks” icon to change if necessary or just verify the group is correct:

OK, enough about grouping landmarks, but that’s necessary for the final report:

Make sure to refresh or hit F5 on your browser to pick up the new landmark group, and run a landmark report for Scion 4000 for ONLY the landmark group called “CA Coastal Cities” — make sure to click on the “Passing Through” checkbox to ensure you get driving activity which does not begin/end a stop as well.

And .6 seconds later, here is the answer:

103.8 hours in Santa Monica, 9 minutes passing through Venice, and 25 minutes in Playa Del Ray with 9 minutes stopped there for something (Breakfast? — too quick):

Turning on the “Places of Interest” layer we see it’s a McDonald’s (which explains why it’s only 9 minutes):

You get the idea — this article has gotten long…

Hopefully it gives you a good example of how to use Google Earth, along with GPS Insight landmarks/landmark groups, and our landmark report.

One nice feature I’ll mention though is this — if you want to remove a particular landmark from a group because it doesn’t belong there, just click on the “minus” sign near the landmark name in the report:

You are given a chance to “OK” or cancel the deletion:

This is a great example of how our reports allow you to interact to create/delete/remove landmarks, pull up maps, etc. We are always trying to make the product more able to answer questions about your fleet, and the interface easier for you to do so efficiently.

It truly took me 3 minutes to get the answer to my initial question — but about an hour & 15 minutes to document it in this article. It’s a long one, thanks for reading it.

Thanks,
Rob.

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.

I got an odd-hours alert for our GPS Insight Scion (the wrapped vehicle we use to do advertising, occasional installs, etc.).

One of our employees took it home tonight, which is fine — miles & miles of cheap advertising since he lives far away from the office.

Except they’re speeding so I looked online to see what’s going on. (I also got a speeding alert…)

The Scion has 3 units installed — a 3500, a 4000, and a 3000. The “Scion” vehicle is the 3500, at 2 minute updates, and the others are at 1 minute updates.

This was a pretty interesting distribution of whereabouts on the 60 heading West, all speeding, but nicely spaced out between location reports:

I just thought I would share, it looked interesting.

FYI, the “out of range” “Pedestrian” units are our EZ-1000’s — when you turn them off, to save on battery, they rightfully go “out of range” – since we only have a few for testing on our account, they are all turned off at night, since we’re not out patrolling the mall, etc…

A few minutes later, the 3 units in the Scion are still equally spread out — this time Alena is in chase. I’m guessing she’s trying to catch up to her husband, who is driving home from wherever they met for dinner together…

And here we go, the culprit is…. Grant, stopped finally at Grant House.

[The night after I wrote this article, 3 of our installers are driving the Scion to coordinate a large install in California together, and one has an EZ-1000 with him (don’t ask me why he named it ‘Ghost Rider’ — I have no idea). Now there are 4 different types of tracking device in the Scion, all together, again all speeding… That’s California though, they’re probably getting passed left & right.

Here’s a picture of the 4 units, off by just a bit time/reporting-wise, all in an alert mode. Bear in mind the speeds are slightly different due to them having different 1-2 minute sample timeframes:

Rob.

So I talked about the “inaugural run” with the EZ-1000 here.

I mentioned that we can sacrifice battery life for accuracy/frequency, and vice versa.

So on the way home from Mexico, I put an EZ-1000 in 8 second update mode and it ran for 16 hours before the battery ran out.

Once I came home (via the same route I run typically), I went for a run, & took the unit with me.

I want to show the accuracy of this unit in “high accuracy mode” — it’s amazingly accurate.

Here is the route of me driving home with the unit in my cup-holder:

You can see that I ran to the edge of the road, and purposely waited 10 seconds to begin running back to ensure an “idle” (blue) dot showed up where I stopped running:

Note that there is no sidewalk at that area of the road so I am on the Eastbound side, opposite where I drove earlier (the line without any “pins”).

Zooming down, the accuracy is ridiculous — you can see where I cross the street because the sidewalk ends and there is more room to run on the other side (both heading out and coming back) — you can even tell that I stay to the right of the sidewalk each direction!:

So it was ridiculously windy (really, it wasn’t that I just got back from 4 days of eating & drinking in Mexico and am out of shape), and I had to walk for a block twice during my Westbound (into the wind) return to home. It’s trivial to pick that out based on the map points:

And I wanted to “simulate” a patrolman taking a shortcut because they were too tired to go the full route to the entry gate & simply cut through the drainage culvert (we don’t have sewers here in the desert…):

While I was “simulating” a lazy patrolman & taking the shortcut, for the blog’s sake, I had to walk through some shrubs where I thought “I should probably not do this since it’s beginning to be rattlesnake season” (Spring & Autumn are when the snakes are warm but not too hot to head to the mountains in AZ).

As I was heading back to my house, sure enough, I saw a rattlesnake in the road (warming up in the late afternoon) but didn’t have my phone to take a picture for the blog’s sake, and to convince my kids to stay out of the desert. I ran home, grabbed my camera, ran back, but by then it was gone.

Here’s that activity:

Sorry, no fun rattlesnake picture for the blog except how long it took me to get home (.10 miles), grab my camera (and my kid who I figured I would have come with to see it), run back (.10 miles), and find the snake gone (I saw its skin it left in the dirt nearby the next day, for what it’s worth).

5 minutes, from 3:45 to 3:50 PM, according to GPS, is too long to expect a rattlesnake to sit around and wait for a neighbor to come back and take its picture (or club it depending on the neighbor…) :

Anyway, this should give you an idea for how accurate the EZ-1000 is for piecing together a security person’s day, a police-officer’s beat and/or pursuit/apprehension (pardon the pun), etc.

We look forward to helping you with your exact requirements using the EZ-1000 (or any GPS Insight offering), and hope you avoid the rattlesnakes.

Rob.

So we went on a short vacation to Puerto Penasco (Rocky Point) Mexico for our kids’ Spring Break last week.

I took an EZ-1000 with a Mexico-compatible SIM in it, and tested out the coverage AND the water-proof-ness (if that’s a word).

Here are my 2 boys on the banana boat (a towed inflatable boat which we bought rides on for $5 each).

Note the boat states “not to be towed at more than 15 MPH” — we can show where the ride took us and that they exceeded that speed, not that there are any Federales out there enforcing the banana boat speed limits.

So the first “lap” I was holding on to Sarah (my 3 1/2 year old) and so I couldn’t get a picture of us all at once.

I pull up the 3D history of our banana boat trip, referencing the picture’s date & time, like so (choosing “Beach Patrol” — what I named the unit, and 3/20):

Then I click on each point and see the speed at that particular 15 second update — they’re all between 8 and 11 MPH since I had my young daughter & I asked them the boat “Captain” to drive slow for one lap until I dropped her off with my wife Kristi on the shore:

Once we got back to shore after lap 1, a wave knocked both Sarah and me off into the Ocean. She & I got soaking wet but made it into shore. The EZ-1000 is fairly water resistant so it kept on reporting and didn’t get damaged even though it was completely underwater for some time in the waves (It won’t make it on a dive trip though…) I also looked at the time stamp on the picture & noticed that Kristi took the picture after the first lap (14:49:52).

So we go on laps 2 & 3, which are about 2/3 of a mile from one end to another based on the “ruler” I use in Google Earth (note the white line I drew between the farthest points — I could also trace a “path” and see how many miles it was in total).

By checking some of the points, I see the speeds go from a peak of 11 MPH up to 25 MPH — definitely more than the 15 MPH safety limit on the side of the boat, not that anyone minded:

Here is a picture taken by Kristi as the boys & I were getting off the boat after the last 2 “laps”:

Note the time is 2:59:00 (not sure it’s 100% accurate on my camera, but it’s close).

Look at the “picture” from GPS Insight with Google Earth:

I was able to “dial in” exact time the picture was taken with the new Google Earth 5 “time Slider” by entering the exact time into the control (press the “wrench” to bring up this dialog box):

A couple days later we took another longer banana boat ride with just the boys from town. I had used the GPS Insight interface to put the EZ-1000 in 8 second update mode vs. the 15 second mode for the first trip. You can see how much more accurate the path is with that refresh interval here (in red, vs. pink):

Incidentally, we get 16 hours on a battery charge at 8 second updates (I tested on the way back from Mexico, that’s another story for another blog article).

And that’s about all I have to say about Banana Boat Racing with the kids — here’s a good picture to leave off with:

Now we’re home — back to school and back to work.

Rob.

Los Angeles Police Department puts on a yearly race from LA area to Las Vegas. It’s 120 MILES long, through the desert, at night. 242 teams of 20 runners each participate. That’s 4,840 runners! (running 6 miles each).

It’s called the Baker to Vegas Relay.

A customer of ours, Crown Disposal sponsored one of the teams this year — the San Fernando/South Pasadena/Compton team.

Their head of IT, Jerry Prieto, asked us to loan them a GPS device and an account where they could view the progress of the race, to supplement their elaborate communications already in place to track the race.

We are happy to do so — Crown Disposal has been a GPS Insight customer for years and has given us ideas for many improvements to our product (the Speed Bands report, imported rolloff locations color-coded by age, etc).

Using an infrequently used aspect of our product “Customer Sites,” I was able to put a publicly available website out there for anyone to watch the race progress. It took about 1 minute to do this, and is seen here:

And in Satellite View we see where they ended (at the Las Vegas Hilton):

Anyway, the race commenced Saturday night, and the vehicle should have taken 120 miles to get there.

Here is a track of that vehicle, and since I really don’t know where the race physically began, I traced back from Vegas roughly 120 miles to start my “search.”

This screen shot shows I’m not too far off — the light green dots are speeding events (76 MPH max, in this case then slowing down to 6 MPH) prior to stopping at the beginning of the race:

The vehicle had driven 113.5 miles that day — we’ll subtract that from the ending mileage for the day to arrive at 120 miles in just a minute.

They leave out at 10:40:57:

From the time they got to the starting point (on Death Valley Rd., by the way, in the middle of NOWHERE…), it was just about an hour before they started their team race.

Nice terrain to have to run up! — We’re tracking the vehicle which is the lead for the team — they had several vehicles to carry all the 20 runners.

At least whoever was running at 3:21 AM got to go downhill:

They arrive at the Hilton (the finish line) at 7:55 AM — 123.4 miles and 21 hours, 15 minutes later. That’s an average of 5.65 Miles Per Hour.

The car drove a few extra miles doubling back, etc., relative to the racers’ 120 mile trek (although it might be a few more miles, I didn’t measure it myself…).

Anyway, we’re happy to help with this fantastic 25 year old event, and appreciate Crown Disposal’s invitation to help them help LAPD and the world’s “biggest police chase” as they call it.

Rob.

I haven’t been out golfing for a LONG time — it’s busy here at GPS Insight.

But the head of marketing for a great local company we work with (bluemedia — www.bluemedia.com) invited a couple of us out to golf the other day.

So I got to enjoy the day on Wednesday & we played 27 holes.

But I needed to test accuracy and battery life on our new EZ-1000 so I put two of them in my pocket during the day. Here’s what they look like:

One was set for 15 second updates, sent every minute (blue), and one was simply set for every minute (orange).

You can see slightly more information on the blue track, and they are slightly more accurate since they are keeping constant GPS, but again, as I’ve mentioned, that drops the battery life down. We get about 20 hours at 15 second updates once a minute. We get around 40 hours by transmitting every 1 minute. The customer will have the ability to modify the settings “on the fly” so that the battery vs. information/accuracy tradeoff is in their hands.

This will be useful for foot patrols, dismounted police and security officers, and similar applications.

You can get a lot more information from this, such as we got off on time for our 7:36 tee time, and that I went to the water to try to get the ball I rolled into the pond on the 13th hole:

This shows my vehicle parked at the golf course for 9:45 (I didn’t get a lot of work done that day…):

But this is more telling of what activity occurred there:

We are going to start encouraging our customers to consider this product in addition to vehicle tracking, particularly if their drivers need to spend extended periods of time outside of the vehicle. They will double as a panic alarm, since they have a button for this on the side.

For more information on the EZ-1000 give us a call, or look on the website and in the blog under articles in the category “hardware EZ-1000″ — for a picture check out this article here.

Cast:

Lost Driver: Rob’s beautiful wife Kristi

Dispatch: Rob at his desk on a beautiful Saturday afternoon

Important Delivery: birthday present

Happy Customer: Birthday boy

Pretend this is a business scenario — this happens hundreds of times a day with our product for our customers.

My 6 year old is heading to a birthday party with my wife driving. The address is new and doesn’t show up on her navigation built into the car.

I’m at work & she called and asked me for directions.

Since I’m sitting at my desk, and we usually have our account pulled up, it took me about 15 seconds to tell her how to get there.

Just type in the address in Google Earth (this works on our browser map as well, I just happen to like Google Earth more).

Right click it and choose “Get Directions To.” Then either click or right click her car and choose “Get Directions From.”:

So then the directions come up:

And I explain to her how to wind over to the new street address (clearly a new subdivision since the aerial photo shows it as dirt)

Then I watch as she takes a wrong turn anyway… (It’s not like I follow directions well either). I’m able to call her & explain she needed to take a left, not a right.

Then she’s back on track, and gets to the address.

But then she stops there for 4 minutes, & moves somewhere else?

Why? I’m guessing the party is at the subdivision clubhouse. Turn on Street Maps, & confirm that’s the case:

Or maybe they’re having it in the park, who knows? I’ll find out later. Meanwhile I am getting caught up at work on a Saturday. It only took 30 seconds to find and get directions to my wife, & another 30 to call her back & help in the maze of this new area. Unfortunately it takes me longer than that to document this good example for the blog, but it’s done now, & I’m only 40 minutes farther away from getting out of the office on this beautiful day in Scottsdale. I wish I had taken Ryan to the party instead!

This should illustrate the real time dispatch assistance you can give using GPS Insight though — call our sales or support for more info at 866-GPS-4321.

Rob.

We are testing out this new tracking device which I mentioned in the past couple articles.

I am trying to lose a few pounds gained from the past 2 trade shows in Dallas (mmm, barbeque…).

So I went on a run today and put the tiny device in my right shorts pocket and headed on my usual route.

Here is the 2 minute-by-2 minute track:

As always with GPS Insight, green means moving, blue means idling (e.g. 0 mph as I start/end the run), and the color and thickness of the line goes from “light and thin” to “dark and thick” to help indicate direction of travel which helps visually determine the vehicle’s (or runner’s) activity more easily.

Here is a different perspective which shows me leaving my subdivision and heading EAST 2 miles then turning around at the main road. Note that the light blue line is much closer to the sidewalk than the line coming back (about 100 feet off). I took the same sidewalk the whole way — what happened? This is where battery life vs. 100% accuracy comes in. 100% accuracy, we are good for 10-12 hours on a charge. But we can go well over 3 days on a charge at 2 minute updates if the GPS unit is allowed to sleep between those two minutes — this generally adds some error to the location, in this case up to 100 feet when I’m not faced toward the satellites.

Well, as I mentioned, I put this tiny tracker in my right pocket and headed East. When I headed back, my body was “in the way” of the GPS signal from the predominant GPS satellites in this area at this time, in the Southern sky. This means they caught a bit of a bounced signal from the houses, trees, etc. to my right. This subtle difference shows up on the map. The accuracy of these units is very good (best case, 5 feet, worst case, 100 feet), considering the GPS satellites are 22,370 miles in space, and the tiny device is in my running shorts pocket (don’t worry, we won’t sell this one, and they are VERY waterproof, fyi…). The moral of the story is they’re highly accurate if you only need them for 10-12 hours on a charge, and pretty accurate if you want 3 days (at two minute updates). If you want less frequent updates, they’ll run up to 10-15 days on a single charge.

Our more powerful vehicle-mounted GPS tracking devices are always within 5-15 feet while driving, and typically within 10-30 feet of accuracy when parked. Either way, that is VERY good considering the standard accuracy of a single GPS fix is 9 meters in any direction. This is because only the US Military gets the “100% accurate” signals — for the rest of us it’s only guaranteed within 27′. However, the more samples you take in a given period of time, the more accurate you can become by eliminating the really far off samples. This is a topic for another day. Thankfully, our customers aren’t harvesting grain or painting road lines based on our “civilian” GPS. We don’t cost nearly as much either (trust me).

So to use Google Earth to its fullest, I outlined the path I ran and measured it to be 4.59 miles (I’m getting tired as we speak…):

[Nice mini-racecar track my neighbor has, huh? Unfortunately I don't know him...]

I can run a quick activity detail report for my rough speed while running (along with a “12 MPH” which is bad — it’s due to my going into the house & losing GPS signal which can cause a transient issue with this unit (currently, we are programming it to be less likely once we sell them).

Anyway, that’s some of what you can do with our new small, rechargable EZ-1000. (shown below):

By the way, did I mention it was 85 degrees today here in Scottsdale…? A little hot for a run already (sorry everyone back in the Northeast & Chicago)

Thanks,
Rob.

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:

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…).

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

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.

Thanks,
Rob.

We haven’t started officially selling the GPSI-1000 yet, but I decided to test it today on a trip to the Phoenix Zoo with my family.

The GPSI-1000 is a tiny GPS tracking device which is battery operated and can be worn on a belt by security personnel, and other generally “outdoors” workers whose safety or productivity needs to be tracked by management.

It is TINY — only 1.4 inches wide by 2.5 inches long:

I wore it on my belt under my shirt all day & tracked my whereabouts every 2 minutes.

It isn’t something we recommend for tracking vehicles — our GO-3000, GPSI-4000, and LD/HD-3500 are the best for that.

But if you want to track your employees when they are OUTSIDE of the vehicle, it’s a great way to go. It will be available later in March.

At 2 minute update rates, it’s enough to know where a person has gone, and it has enough battery to last at least a day between charges.

Additionally, there is a single button which will allow us to implement either a panic alarm or a “mark my location” capability.

Here is a map of both my tracked vehicle (Navigator, the red lines) as well as the GPSI-1000 (worn while I drove, in blue):

The GPSI-4000 in my Navigator is fantastic at tracking the vehicle with fantastic accuracy. The GPSI-1000 (person tracker, really) does a good job but is only 2 minute updates, and occasionally loses track since its internal antenna is inside of the vehicle where it doesn’t get sufficient GPS signal. That’s not its job though.

When I get out of the vehicle, then it shows where we went, every 2 minutes. I won’t bore you with details of how much time we spent looking at giraffes, zebras, amphibians, etc. But I could — all we would need to do is overlay a map of the zoo, put up some geofences to match, and run a landmark report.

Instead, I can illustrate a little of that. Bear in mind that our typical GPSI-1000 “tracked individual” might be a security guard, a dock worker, a temporary worker who doesn’t need a wired GPS device in his or her car, etc.

But I can show you how accurate and useful this hardware can be, especially when combined with a vehicle tracking device:

Basically, once the driver “dismounts” the vehicle and does a patrol, some mowing of yards, movement of equipment, etc., you can still track that individual.

And if you want to know when and for how long they rode the Merry Go Round, you can use our typical GPS Insight capabilities:

Create a polygon around the satellite image of the Carousel (giving it a few more feet to make sure we catch the activity around it):

Then cut/paste into GPS Insight:

Then Paste into “Quick Import” under the Mapping: Landmarks menu:

After quickly refreshing the menu so that the new landmark shows up, run a landmark report:

.07 seconds later:

And here is the accuracy of the units while I was on the Carousel with my 3 kids and wife:

And here were the kids on the Carousel, oldest to youngest:

And on the way there with my family, I kept it under 68 (in a 65 MPH) on the trip there & back — the accuracy between both units is very good in terms of location, speed, and time — here are 2 points right next to each other & only 1 mph off [I called this unit the "Pants Patrol" since I was going to wear it on my belt, in case you were wondering...]:

These units should be available late March for $350 (with applicable $25 quantity discounts at 10, 25, 50, 100, 250 levels). Monthlies will range from $15-40 depending on update frequency (on 1 per hour/on demand to 1 minute). We should have a heavy equipment version of this unit available in April as well.

Thanks,

Rob.

We started working with a well respected expert in the golf industry, Bill Yates — founder of Grey Town Golf, LLC. They are a golf management company in Pebble Beach, CA. Bill’s expertise is consulting to courses about how to improve the pace of play.

Based on his interest in a prior blog article we have begun work on a system for using GPS technology to improve the pace of play as well as maintenance and service at golf courses by tracking the various types of golf carts.

Starfire in Scottsdale was nice enough to work with us on this project, and here are 5 of their carts for yesterday:

Here is that activity as a movie:

GPS Insight movie of golf carts throughout the day

I need to remember how to embed that video into the blog, but for now it will open up in a new window.

This sample data allows us to now write alerts, reports, and maps which will allow Bill and Grey Town Golf to improve their pace of play system significantly.

Here is a “current status” dashboard view of the course and the 5 carts we’re tracking currently:

We look forward to bringing this system to market in early 2009 (and maybe I’ll get some time to test it out on the course myself…).

Rob.

This is the 3rd (and last) in a series on GPS tracking of skiers, and more to the point, the overlaying of ski maps into Google Earth in order to put that data into reference. So after asking someone way better at Photoshop than me to “stretch” that ski trail map of Heavenly Lake Tahoe and make it fit Google Earth, it has become VERY clear that those maps aren’t even close to accurate.

Photoshopping the map & stretching/skewing it to fit, then overlaying the sides to be accurate, it’s still obvious that there is no real scale built into these maps. The Gondola is nowhere near reality:

So we aborted the mission of overlaying this map in favor of simply recreating the runs as Google Earth “paths.”

Here is what it looks like once you add a number of “paths” and “placemarks” in Google Earth, using the map as a reference, and the satellite photo with the missing trees as evidence of where the ski runs actually are:

The paths are color-coded based on type (typical green/blue/black difficulty based on the map) and the Gondola is in red.

If you were using GPS Insight to say, track your Snowcats (which are used to groom the runs regularly), you would be able to run reports on which runs were groomed on which days, for how many hours, etc. This is actually something we’re starting to see some interest in from some ski resorts which is part of the motivation for this exercise (if I had thought about it in advance I could have written off the trip!).

You can see how accurate this is if you take a little time to properly map the trails — We show activity skiing right along Orion, Skyline Trail, and Ridge Run (as well as us taking the lift up ABOVE Ellies — I didn’t take my 8 year old snowboarder on this black (he probably would have done better than me, actually).

Using a combination of a ski trail map and Google Earth with recent imagery, it is easy to see which runs particular GPS data recorded activtity on.

We’re going skiing tomorrow in Pinetop AZ at “Sunrise” park (www.sunriseskipark.com) — here’s their much more straightforward trail map.

I’m done overlaying them, I think everyone gets the point now (on to more vehicle based GPS tracking topics next!)

Thanks,

Rob.

I realized I didn’t have much data from the prior 2 days’ skiing so I put the tracking device in 20 minute mode and you can see we have more to go on now.

Here you can start to see the (thawed versions of) trails and where the points themselves lie:

Next I will begin to merge the Google Earth version of the mountain with the Heavenly Ski map:

Since the map itself is drawn on a vertical angle, I will need to reshape it, something I need to do anyway as we’ve started working on a project of this sort for a customer. This is a relatively simple thing to do, provided you know how to do it. I don’t, so I’ve got some Photoshop reading to do…

When I figure it out, I’ll finish this overlay & make it plus the data available for you to look at in Google Earth.

Rob.

GPS Insight is working on a new line of package tracking devices. They’re geared toward placement in valuable shipments – plasma TV’s, cigarettes, bank bags, etc. The beauty of these units is that they don’t use only GPS signals to determine their location — they can use the E-911 cell phone system to VERY ACCURATELY determine their location.

For instance, I put one in the trunk of my car, drove into our covered concrete parking structure at the office, and this device knew where I was within 10 feet.

I put one in my oldest son’s (8) pocket (they’re very small, only a 1″ x 1″ x 2″) yesterday when we went skiing in Lake Tahoe on our yearly vacation. These units are typically used on a “every 4 hours or whenever I ask for a location” basis. Jack is a good snowboarder, but why not stick a device on him in case I lose him somewhere, right…?

[BY THE WAY, we do >> NOT << sell GPS tracking devices to people for tracking their kids, spouses, lovers, whatever -- we are strictly B2B (Business to Business)]

So Jack didn’t fall down the side of some slope and get stuck where I coudn’t find him, so the only “locate” we got on him were the “scheduled” 4:30 (MST), 3:30 PM local time ones, which were both close to the top of the Gondola (which you need to be on by 4 PM to get back down). Here are the two, and you can see they’re within .35 miles of each other (yesterday we were heading back a little earlier than the previous day since he was tired out from some longer runs):

Here’s a picture of the mountain & where the Gondola goes from the base to the mountain:

So how can I really tell where those points are (or worse case scenario, where my lost kid is if necessary)?

Here is a map of Lake Tahoe’s “Heavenly” resort:

I will put this map into a digital overlay in Google Earth so that we can see more easily where EXACTLY these GPS device locates were. This allows us to put “reality” on a map relative to “usefulness” — e.g. a ski trail map is much easier to use to locate someone than a map or satellite photo of a mountain.

I’ve never created a “vertical” overlay like this, so I think I’ll need to Photoshop this graphic a bit in order to stretch it to match the mountain.

This is a big enough exercise that it will be another blog article. I’ll post the link here when it’s done. I’m on vacation and the Gondola is closed due to wind, so I wrote this one article, but the next one will have to wait until I’m back to work most likely. I’ve got 3 more days in Tahoe, so I’m going to enjoy it and stop typing now.

Happy New Year !

Rob.

I decided to test a unit in my car today at 3 second updates (vs. the typical 2 minute, sometimes 1 minute/30 second updates).

It is WAY too much information, but interesting to see.

I was able to look at the map and literally remember what was going on at that second. I can see excruciating detail about:

• Lane changes to get through traffic
• Right turn/U-turn to avoid a long line turning left
• Searching for a space at my son’s over-crowded track meet
• Slow service at the Dairy Queen drive through afterward

First, here are a couple pictures of my vehicle’s activity (and 2 others in “Rob Group”) for reference. My vehicle has 3 different units at 3 different reporting intervals — 2 minute, 1 minute, and 3 second.

I quickly run a “2 click” history map:

I took my 2 boys to a track meet after work and didn’t bother to check directions to the field first. Here is a zoomed in view of a winding road where I realized I didn’t know where I was going, then pulled into a corporate driveway to enter the address into my car’s GPS navigation (which didn’t know the address since I haven’t bought the newest disc from Chrysler…):

The amount of granularity is unbelievable at 3 second updates (if you’re paying attention, I missed a turn here by the way…):

• Lane changes to get through traffic

• Right turn/U-turn to avoid a long line turning left

Interestingly, Jolene our office manager cell phone text messaged me at 5:52 telling me to turn left since she could see where I had gone the wrong way (I had to call the office and ask her for directions since my car didn’t have the latest maps (not GPS Insight’s fault, just mine for not bothering to buy the new maps every year…)).

At 5:51, when she saw I had taken a “wrong turn,” I was exactly where the green pin above shows me moving (courtesy of the “time slider”):

• Searching for a space at my son’s over-crowded track meet

Incidentally, it was pretty close to .75 miles as far as I can measure based on where they ran (thanks to the path measurement tool in Google Earth which our customers use for our 3D mapping):

And it was definitely illegal parking, per Street View (a trick to make sure you are looking the right direction is to”get behind” the right bubble from the correct angle when you turn on Street View as shown below):

[note it even shows that I backed up a bit to get as far out of the street as I could]

Double-clicking on that “photo bubble” shows this exact sign which I parked right in front of:

• Slow service at the Dairy Queen drive through afterward

It should not take 10 minutes to get 3 ice cream cones from the DQ in the middle of our frigid 48 degree winter here in Scottsdale:

And you can tell that:

1. I had to do 2 U-turns to get into DQ and turned back in the right direction home when leaving
2. the building had an overhang since it interfered very slightly with the GPS signal, causing what we call “GPS drift or bounce” — this was only 15 feet of “drift” but I want to explain the spaghetti which occurs with 3 second updates — typically vehicles move a lot more than 15 feet between 2 location updates (1 or 2 minutes apart) — with 3 second updates, there is more drift visible, but it’s a trivial 15 feet — we’re not planting crops here so it’s not the end of the world.

OK, I think you get the idea here — 3 second updates makes for a lot of data, and a long blog article. But a lot of our customers are asking for this type of thing:

• 10 second updates for garbage trucks during operating hours (they take 12 seconds to empty a can, so this ensures we see every pickup event without needing to wire the arms for a switch input)
• 30 second updates when an ambulance’s lights are on vs. 2 minutes when they’re off (triggered using a switch)
• 5 second updates when a truck is inside a port vs. 5 minute updates when it’s outside the port boundary
• 10 second updates when an airport vehicle is on the runway vs. 60 second when it’s not
• 10 second updates when a vehicle is speeding vs. 2 minutes when it is not

This article should hold some good information about many different applications of “high frequency” updates. Unfortunately they cost significantly more, which is why we do what we can to get as much good data out of as infrequent of updates as is reasonable. I’ll be changing my car’s refresh rate back to 1 minute tomorrow… It’s overkill for me:

Rob.

We got a call today from a golf club that wants to track their carts in order to make sure the pace of play isn’t getting too slow.

Since we have several options available from a hardware standpoint, we can help with this requirement, and will probably put together (I unconsciously typed that as “putt ogether”) a golf-centric offering.

They want to be alerted when more than 2 carts are “bunched up” on a tee box, which indicates a ranger needs to go out to speed one foursome up.

Using GPS Insight, we can easily define the tee boxes, and alert/report on too many carts within a single boundary, and are happy to develop reports to help the golf industry to speed up the pace of play.

GPS Insight has a pretty golf-centric staff, so this is an interesting project we will get involved with. For a typical golf course, it will cost $350 per cart, and $32.95 per month — roughly $1.50 a day on a lease. Since the golf industry works about every day, they’ll get their money’s worth. Also, since this line of “non-diagnostic” hardware can be turned off seasonally, there will be no activation/deactivation fees for them. If this helps squeeze one more foursome in per day, that’s instant ROI, plus greater customer satisfaction from a day at the course which actually moves along at a 4 hour pace.

More on the ROI — out on Scottsdale, $175 a round isn’t uncommon. Let’s assume it’s only $50. Times 4 players, that’s $200. for 75 carts (typical), the cost is $112.50. That’s a 77.5% return on investment, PLUS they know where the carts are at all times, can analyze usage patterns, compare cart usage to actual rounds paid for (sorry all you friends of the cashier who don’t pay for your carts or rounds)… Also, we can put an alert/report in there to identify how long a cart’s run since being recharged or refueled in order to keep customers happy (no more getting stranded on the 15th with a dead cart). You can also find out who is not following the “cart path only” rules when they apply.

There are plenty of courses here in Scottsdale for us to test this new capability:

Plus, our favorite, you can use text messaging to find out how far away the beverage cart is…

Just don’t ask us to track your golf ball.

Rob.

We have 3 separate GPS tracking devices installed on our GPS Insight Scion. I just happened to look at the GPS Insight office on the map and thought I would share the screenshot:

It shows all 3 stopped for 7 hours, 22 (23) minutes at “GPSI- New” (our new office), and the dashboard shows them all parked within a few feet of each other (one’s actually installed in the back of the car & the other are in the front).

Each unit has its own strengths — one does diagnostics which lets us know engine issues (there better not be any, it’s only got 2,600 miles on it…) and MPG, like in this 30 day MPG report I just ran (which took .16 seconds to run):

One is less expensive and capable of 30 second updates and one switch (panic alarm, door contact, concrete pump, etc.).

The other product allows for bluetooth internet, up to 20 switches and sensors, and 5 second updates (but it gets expensive at that rate).

Anyway, they all live together in harmony in our Scion, suited to their own particular requirements.

And they all alert the same whenever someone takes the Scion out of the office, speeds in it, or drives it at night or on weekends:

Yields:

Since we only installed the SCION Q4 today, it didn’t alert other than “appearing” in the GPSI – New landmark at 15:46:57 today.

These alerts let me know whenever someone is taking the Scion to head to a customer, an install, lunch, etc. They are the same alerts our customers use for any number of business reasons, and are extremely useful.

Let us know your business requirements, and we’ll be happy to help you meet them using the most suitable version of our product.

Thanks,

Rob.

While testing some new units today (mentioned in the previous article), we saw a couple of 1-2 minute “lags” from the time a GPS location/speed/direction measurement was taken and what time it made it to our servers over the AT&T network.

We are able to pull in exact coverage maps and “overlay” them on top of the troublesome points (1-2 minutes is still VERY GOOD, but typically points take only 2-5 seconds from the time they’re reported to the time we have them in our database for our customers’ real-time-mapping and alerts):

You can see the highlighted times from report to receipt on the left, and the one 2 minute “lagged” point takes place right where AT&T claims only “Good” coverage — not “Best” coverage. You can tell by the lighter shade of orange.

Here is another Salesperson — David, and he had mostly 2-6 second updates, but had a couple of 1-2 minute reports. Again, the 2 minute report is right where AT&T drops from “Best” to “Good” coverage:

You can see that the vast majority of the 1-minute-by-1-minute reports take just a few seconds to become available — the only exceptions are typically 1-2 minutes where we need to retry because the AT&T signal isn’t strong enough or we temporarily lose a connection.

This happens without our customers even noticing typically. No data is ever lost — we “Store and Forward” so that could drive to a foreign county where we don’t have coverage (Mexico for us Scottsdale-dwellers), and all that data will be forwarded up once you hit the border again.

Since we are constantly testing and building tools like this to help us test our GPS Insight tracking devices and software, I thought I would share a glimpse of how we visualize the quality of our service.

Here are a couple coverage/Store-and-Forward related articles which talk about this as well:

Finding lost vehicles using GPS Insight

GPS Insight and the US Border

GPS Insight partnered with design powerhouse bluemedia to create our new company vehicle, shown below:

They were great to work with, and did a phenomenal job of designing, producing, and installing this wrap for us in virtually no time.

Here was our final design (took about 3 changes to get right, only 30 minutes of my time):

From their website: “bluemedia is a leading provider of design and printing for use in vehicle, large format and environmental graphic applications for B-to-B and B-to-C organizations. Through its combination of cutting edge technology, nontraditional approach to ideas and design expertise, bluemedia helps companies get noticed and gain market share through highly relevant communications.” They are offering a 15% discount to any of our customers on their first wrap — Call Mike Greco, his phone number is 480-317-1333 and his email is mike.greco@bluemedia.com.

They sent me the top picture, which helped answer a question I had — why did they drive it 6 miles after they wrapped it? They obviously have a nice deserted desert parking lot (pardon the pun) where they take their vehicles to add pictures to their substantial portfolio.

We track this vehicle with 2 different tracking devices (one gives diagnostics data and 2 minute updates, and one is less expensive, and gives 30 second updates), and I noticed they had driven the vehicle after wrapping it. I saw this while I was doing a demonstration of our product that day to a customer. It just seemed odd — they weren’t speeding or anything, and didn’t take it anywhere like a restaurant, etc.

I ran a history for the day they wrapped it like this:

And started to zoom down on the activity in question:

They took a very quick photo at this spot, not even stopping long enough to register a stop (2 minues):

This is the Phoenix Zoo, (which we already had landmarked for some reason), and I wondered why the Scion had gone there earlier today when I looked through our weekly Scion landmark report which I have delivered to my email weekly.

Here’s the landmark report (both by landmark as well as by vehicle (technically 1 vehicle but it counts as 2 since we have 2 different devices in it):

Note it only takes .26 seconds to run that report for a week’s activity. Anyway, it wouldn’t be a blog article unless I threw in some ways you can use GPS Insight to help you gain understanding and accountability of your fleet.

But it’s more fun to drive this car than read the reports on it. Here are a couple more pictures of the car — it’s coming to a trade show near you!…

Thanks again to bluemedia! — Give Mike Greco a call at 480-317-1333/480-452-4114 or email him at mike.greco@bluemedia.com and he’ll be happy to help you with your vehicle’s wrap (and make sure you have us track it while you’re at it…)!

By the way, they also have a great blog at www.bluemedia.com/blueline.

Thanks,

Rob.

I’m watching the news as Hurricane Gustav has begun to hit the coast, and I wondered how much damage there has already been.

Using Google Earth, I was able to pull up a picture of it by turning on “Weather” under “Layers.”

Since I can pull up all of our customers’ vehicles within Google Earth, I can see where they are relative to the storm:

It’s obscuring my view of which vehicles are underneath it, so I can remove the clouds by unchecking them under Weather, and change the transparency of the radar image with the transparency slider:

Now I can better see which vehicles are in the storm right now:

Thankfully all of them except 2 or 3 have been stopped for more than an hour (we know this since they are red).

One on the outskirts is moving, and when I look at the time it reported vs. the time my map refreshed, it is within 2 minutes (typically, it takes 2-3 seconds to make it into our database, and our vehicles reoprt every 2 minutes):

This tells me that AT&T is still doing ok in terms of cell coverage. Once it’s over and hopefully there isn’t too much damage, we can run a quick analysis to determine if/when any of our vehicles were unable to communicate due to failures in the cell network. So far so good.

By zooming WAY down, we can actually look UP at the radar image of Hurricane Gustav — a pretty interesting view. Unfortunately, whoever is driving this vehicle has to see the real thing — I hope they are heading out of there.

I looked earlier today and an ambulance customer of our sent some ambulances to the area — hopefully everyone does ok.

Rob.

[ Update -- Gustav has dissipated to a tropical storm as of 9 PM PST.]

I ran a check against all customers’ vehicles which were driving in that area, and only one vehicle had any evidence of cell trouble with AT&T due to the Hurricane.

This screenshot shows a few things:

• the Hurricane above the area in question
• AT&T GPRS (Cell) coverage in orange on the ground (darker orange=better coverage)
• Many vehicles’ paths, with dots close to the ground indicating 2 minute reports, mostly received by GPS Insight within seconds
• The area in the red box shows pins “higher up” in the air, which indicates a delay from the time the measurement was taken and when it was received by us. This “lag” was up to 44 minutes, but all that data was eventually transmitted.

Most likely this “lag” was due to a single damaged cell tower in that area.

Earlier in the day at 8:32 AM, it only took 6 seconds for data to get to GPS Insight from that area. But during the hurricane, at 10:33 PM, there was apparently no cell signal available in that area, so the vehicle needed to drive roughly 34 minutes until it hit a working cell tower.

However, this is the ONLY instance of apparent damage in the cell infrastructure which affected any of our customers in that region, which is great to see. And it only lasted for 30-40 minutes.

This “lag” view is something we use internally to help customers troubleshoot their vehicles (by determining if problems coincide with known AT&T coverage limits) — today it helped to show that Gustav didn’t do much damage to the cell towers in that region, thankfully.

After 3 years in our existing space, it’s time to expand (again) and this time move to some newer space. It’s just 2 1/2 miles away from our existing space, and although we’re moving to 6500 square feet from 5000 feet, we’re probably going to have to give up the golf simulator and the foosball table, although my kids (and maybe a couple employees) will never set foot in the office if we don’t bring the Wii with the 100″ projected screen. I’m not sure where it will go but I’m sure we’ll figure it out.

Here are a few pictures:

Reception:

Outside view:

Conference Room (the big reason we needed to move — ours was half as big and staff meetings were getting a little too close for comfort):

Rob’s new view (I took the worst one of course):

Where all the important meetings take place:

Where your inbound tech support calls will go — 25×18′ of (eventually) our GPS Insight tech support gurus. We have a lot of desks to move…

And the salesperson of the month gets this office:

And if they sell 2,000 devices that month, they can have my office that month… (I’ll probably be traveling anyway):

The building we’re moving into has lots of room for expansion, and so do we — we look forward to servicing our customers from this new space, and hope to see you visit us in it soon (sorry, no ‘General Store/Antiques hanging from the rafters’ restaurant to take you to lunch at in this complex unfortunately — just a coffee shop next door & we’ll need to get in our car and actually drive somewhere now).

And we can always track it — here’s the old office (me getting caught up this weekend):

And the new office (me trying to figure out where everyone will go just before I head home after driving the weekend home-office-office-home circuit):

Rob.

We just released 10 icon shapes and our customers can now choose from them based on groups, vehicle types, or whatever they think is prettiest.

Here’s how it works:

Launch Icon Shapes from the GPS Insight navigation bar:

Choose a group of vehicles, then choose all (or just some) of them:

Then drag and drop a shape onto the selected vehicles. While you’re at it, type in what the shape represents (e.g. Parts, Service, Manager, East Side, West Side, Crazy Driver, whatever):

Now your vehicles will show up with those icons but still be colored appropriately (green = moving, light green = speeding, blue = idling, yellow = short stop, red = long stop) and they’ll still show the direction arrow and a note in case there’s an SMS text message associated with the stop:

And they also show up with these shapes in our 3D Google Earth based mapping:

Soon we will have a “legend” which will tell you which shapes mean what (based on what you defined them as). We invite our customers to ask for new shapes/icon styles. One wants a hamburger so that they can tell when they’re at lunch. Since this customer uses our API to set vehicle labels (and soon to be icons), they’re serious about this. We’ll have to draw some multi-colored hamburgers. Each icon is technically >> 58 << icons so this takes a bit of time. That’s because we have 16 different directions for each of the moving icons (moving/speeding) plus many different colors, also with the “envelope” in the bottom to indicate if they have a note. It might be a while before the hamburger is there.

Here’s information about our SOAP API which will allow them to automate that — it’s available to any customers who choose to use it to integrate with their own systems:

http://support.gpsinsight.com/wiki/support/web_services/soap

Rob.

[an update: Today, 8/11/08, we released the new "legend" which automatically shows what shapes you used to represent different groups -- here's a screen shot:]

GPS Insight makes it easy to answer quick ad-hoc questions like this. Someone asked me if I had been doing a lot of travel lately. Seems like it, but if I want to quantify it accurately, I can just run a quick geofence reoprt on the airport, where I leave my car every time I get on a plane to go somewhere.

I can just type “PHX” (the airport code) in to Google Earth and it takes me right there:

Then just draw a quick polygon geofence around it:

Then run a quick report (and I mean quick, it takes .14 seconds to create with 31 days of history for my vehicle). Note that we allow customers to go back as far as they have data with GPS Insight in order to run these types of reports. I am choosing only 31 days here just to avoid too much disclosure…

And .14 seconds later, we see I’ve spent roughly 12 days (11 days, 22 hours, 35 minutes) parked at or driving through the airport. We can even tell that my Jun 6 flight was on a different airline since I drove 5.7 miles (further West to Terminal 3 for Jet Blue to NYC than the typical Terminal 4 for US Air & Southwest) vs. the typical 1.8-2.1 miles.

This is a nice, quick example of how people (particularly management who allow GPS tracking on their own vehicles) help to determine answers to ad-hoc questions like “how much time did you spend traveling last month” without having to consult a calendar, ticket receipts, etc.

Rob.

We were asked recently to provide a solution for a large mobile advertising company which wanted to be able to:

• More effectively define, document, and sell their routes to customers
• Assure their customers of the time spent driving those routes
• Alert their staff to any infractions of vehicles leaving those routes

GPS Insight now has a “Route Path Tool” which allows you to define a route, document that route, and quantify how much time and mileage was spent on that route.

I will demonstrate on my own vehicle here by running a quick “Rob” 3D Mapping History” for the past “7d” (7 days):

Here is JUST the path (the 2 minute location dots can be easily turned on for more information) :

Using that information, I can select and create a path which is “authorized” which still leaves some activity outside the official route this vehicle should travel:

The orange path (you can choose the color) is simply me clicking the major intersections in order that I want them driven by my driver. Remember we want to drive this path frequently so that our advertising on the side of the truck is seen by as many people, and certain streets (Pinnacle Peak Road, for instance) are driven more frequently in order to backtrack and to allow more people there to see your advertisement.

We save this path into GPS Insight and can display it in many colors, with a “thin to thick” and “light to dark” indicator of direction of travel/order. Additionally, we have numbered icons to tell us which order these intersections should be driven:

I have annotated the blue-lined/numbered path with white arrows to help understand the direction of travel:

Now we can run a report on whether or not my vehicle actually stayed on this path, for how many miles, hours, etc. More importantly, we can find out very easily how much time and how many miles were spent OFF the path. The distance “off path” is configurable depending on the circumstances.

I can show the map of this and circle these two “off route” trips. One was to see my son’s “Heroes” presentation at school (where they talked and sang songs about their favorite heroes), and one was taking the kids to see Iron Man at the theater last night for Ryan’s birthday (good movie, by the way).

Zooming down we can see more information and specific times for both trips to the school (dropping off in the AM and attending the presentation in the evening):

And here were the heroes on stage. They were Christopher Columbus, Sally Ride, Teddy Roosevelt, Orville & Wilbur Wright, & others:

And my hero Ryan, who portrayed Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Heroes Presentation:

You can hardly fault me for driving off-route to go see him in this school presentation, right…?

Google just released a new version of Google Earth at earth.google.com. It’s slightly different from a navigation standpoint, but one of the nicest new features is the “Street View” which helps our customers to put their vehicles’ activity in context.

Here is a picture of many thousands of our vehicles which we track, most of which are red (it’s Sunday & everyone’s been parked > 1 hour). What’s new are these little camera icons in major metro areas, which appear when you turn on “Street View” under Layers on the left.

These cameras indicate that street views are available for that area.

Now when you want to know where someone is (or was) stopped you can see more than just an overhead image:

Here is one of our resellers named John and he’s parked at a large warehouse with many pools set up. I happen to know it’s Paddock Pools in Phoenix since that’s where we got our pool.

But John is there right now, & if I wanted to see this “as if you were there” you just click on that camera on the road to “zoom into” a real picture:

Clicking on “Show Full Screen” brings you into a 3-D picture where you can look around by dragging the world whichever direction you need:

If you want to go down the road a bit you can just click on a new camera icon which represents another photo.

Now you can look at the same building but from a completely different angle:

And when you click on “exit photo” you can then show where the various photos are along the road to pick the best one for your investigative needs…:

All very cool and powerful capabilities, I’m sure this will shed some light on where drivers are taking their lunches for some of our customers…

In addition, you can always turn on “Bars/Clubs” under “Places of Interests” under “Layers” for a comprehensive listing along-side the cameras (they show up as martini glasses) to get a feel for what restaurants/bars are located near driver activity:

There are almost an unlimited number of street photos, and it’s getting more comprehensive, so start making use of this information within your organization.

Rob

With the cost of fuel over $3 per gallon, by far, the easiest way to save money with the GPS Insight product is to curb your fleet’s idling activity.

A GPS Insight salesperson asked our tech support to look into one of his customers’ vehices today, since he used it in a demonstration and it showed as having been idling for more than 23 HOURS. 23 HOURS!

Because we get our idling data off of the engine’s computer using RPM and battery voltage it is always 100% accurate. Other products can’t tell the difference between someone sitting with the key in “ACC” mode so they can listen to the radio and whether or not the engine is really running.

So, once we double-checked to see that the vehicle was truly idling, I decided it was the perfect candidate to compute just how much money 1 hour of idling costs a company.

Since the vehicle started idling at 9:09:39 on Wednesday, and ultimately stopped idling at 10:31 on Thursday, for over a 24 hour period of time, I decided to calculate how much fuel it burned through to determine a fairly accurate “waste” rate.

I determined when it started and stopped idling by running a GPS Insight 3D history map for today and yesterday like this (3 mouse clicks to choose the vehicle, the dates, and run the report).

It takes about a second to pull down that data, and we see that the vehicle finally turns itself off at 10:31:16:

So, now I can check the diagnostics side of the GPS Insight solution to see how many gallons of fuel were consumed during that period:

At close to the time the vehicle STOPPED idling (1/24 at 10:22 AM), the vehicle had a cumulative total idle fuel used of 1945 gallons, per our diagnostics history, which updates roughly every 40 minutes:

Roughly when the vehicle started idling, there were only 1928 gallons of fuel used at that point:

That’s a difference of 1945 – 1928 gallons = 17 gallons of diesel.

17 gallons of diesel for 25.5 hours of idling time.

That’s 2/3rds of a gallon of diesel per hour.

At Diesel at $3.25 a gallon, that’s $55.25 for one day’s worth of tracking, and more than what the cost of GPS Insight is per month.

How much does this truck idle? Let’s pull a report for a few days:

Why could that be? Well, the company is in the horse transport business, and it’s probably to keep their horses warm in the Winter months if they aren’t able to board them immediately.

Let’s pull the weather quickly into the high end, 3D Google Earth-based GPS Insight mapping:

It’s only 45 degrees F where they’re parked, and there may not be enough room where it’s warm to house these horses. They’re probably keeping them warm by running the engine to the truck. Of course I have no idea if that’s the case — just an educated guess. But thanks to this very long idle stop, I now have a good statistic for how much an hour of idling costs a truck owner — 2/3 of $3.25 per gallon = $2.16 an hour.

Rob.

Here is a link to our new Map Book Tool.

http://widgets.yahoo.com/widgets/map-book-page-locator

Thanks to some hard work from our staff, we have created a new tool for anyone who wishes to use it. As I mentioned in a previous post regarding map books, we have started integrating map books into GPS Insight. We have constructed a freely available “map book tool” which allows customers to enter an address, and it will tell you which map book, page, and “quadrant” (e.g. AF-23) the address exists in.

Here is a picture of the tool when you start it (you can ask us to add your favorite map book), and will enter 1611 E. Bonanza, Las Vegas, NV into it to see what happens when we press the “find” magnifying glass:

Again, here is the widget link, but in the meantime, you can install the Yahoo Widget Engine.

Here is the result in our tool:

Note that this tool tells you which map book, which map page, and which part of the page (C4) to look for this address. This is useful for dispatch personnel who can quickly paste an address into our tool, then tell their drivers where to look in their map book for that address.

Here is the address in Google Earth:

Now I can overlay our map book page (for our internal use only — we can’t distribute these as it would be copyright infringement, but you can construct your own & there are instructions in the map book article link above):

You can see that when we overlay the map page 45 from the Yellow1 Map Book for Las Vegas into Google Earth, the address is BARELY inside Column C, Row 4:

Zooming down we see just how accurate the GPS Insight Map Book Tool is. I will place a new placemark (add->placemark) just on the other side of the “border” from C4 to D5, and right-click/Copy that placemark:

Now “process” the Google Earth Placemark in the Map Book Took by right clicking as such:

Now the Map Book Tool shows Column D, Row 5 instead of C4:

We are in the process of adding numerous map books to this product, and will make them available as soon as we can to help people easily find map book/page/quadrants in most major metro areas with Atlas Map Books. This tool will be available immediately on Widgets.Yahoo.com . We already have released a Widget to show the Arizona Department of Transportation cameras here.

GPS Insight is committed to making life easier for our customers and that includes prospective customers. This widget is free, and we invite you to use it. Search for GPS Insight on widgets.yahoo.com and download both of them (it will be a few days until the map book widget is available).

Of course we want users of the free Widgets to become aware of the GPS Insight Vehicle Tracking product and contact us about how we can help their company, which is good for our marketing, but it’s fun, and helpful to our customers. Enjoy & let us know which map books you want added next.

Thanks,

Rob.

This is a really big deal for some of our customers. One of the five mapping types you can choose from with GPS Insight is Google Earth. Until recently, in order to use Google Earth properly under their licensing agreement, our customers were obligated to purchase the $400 version (Earth Pro). However, in September, Google changed their licensing to allow commercial usage with the free version.

Here is the release from Google.

For most GPS Insight customers who use the Google Earth interface (the best we’ve got in my opinion), the cost of licensing Google Earth is still trivial vs. the amount of money saved yearly through their return on the GPS tracking investment.

For instance, even at a VERY conservative 200% ROI on the $1.50-$2 per day which GPS tracking may cost (many customers estimate between 400 and 1000 % ROI), a 100 vehicle customer will save $125,000 per year on the following:

• Fuel costs
  • We give you MPG & fuel consumption data to identify wasteful vehicles and drivers
  • We identify excessive idle time
  • GPS Insight helps you get the closest driver to the next order/job without calling/guessing
• Payroll
  • Drivers will no longer be able to pad hours
  • Time spent on timecards can be spent working on other things
• Unauthorized usage
  • Side trips & side jobs are easy to identify
  • Weekend usage and off-hours usage are easy reports to run
  • Knowing your vehicle are tracked means your employees won’t “walk off” with your materials
• Accurate and defensible billing
  • GPS Insight helps you to bill more accurately and easily, without relying on notes from drivers
  • Service questions are trivial to investigate, defend, and prove
• Maintenence
  • GPS Insight provides instant alerts whenever your engine light comes on
  • Scheduled maintenance reminders are sent
  • Maintenance logs can be kept in GPS Insight
  • Recall data is available for your vehicles
  • GPS Insight comes with GE Roadside Assistance (4 incidents per year per vehicle)

However, for 100 vehicle, there might be (typically) 5 actual dispatch/admin/management personnel who USE GPS Insight to manage those vehicles, so only 5 copies of Google Earth were required, at $400 per copy ($300 if you buy during one of their 2 Earth sales each year). That means $1500 in software for $125,000 in savings. Now it’s $0 in software, since Google allows “consumers” of Earth data to do so commercially, for free.

Some of our customers still prefer the Earth Pro commercial version. Here are the differences between the “free,” the “plus,” and the “Pro” versions ($0, $20, & $400/year per user).

In a nutshell, now our customers ONLY have to upgrade to Pro if they choose to measure areas (job costing), generate movies or high quality images, or import GIS data.

Google makes their money selling ads. If your vehicle has a flat, and you search for “tires” within Google Earth, they get paid on the ads you click on (below), so this makes sense — they may make far more than $300 per user on ads throughout the year, and want commercial users using Earth from home, work, and in some of our customers’ cases, the laptop in their car. More users equals more ad revenue!

On behalf of our customers, and GPS Insight, THANKS GOOGLE!

-Rob

I see many of our customers at their locations and they have map books out frequently. A map book is a book with all of the various low-level maps for a city on single pages, and often times, when dispatching a driver somewhere, they will tell them they need to go to “Map book Las Vegas, Page 25, 5D (let’s say “Heather St.”).

I bought a couple major metro map books today (Phoenix and Las Vegas) thinking we could help our customers in these markets by integrating the map boundary definitions into GPS Insight (but not the images/content – that would be copyright infringement). We want to help the map company sell MORE books because it will be much easier for our customers to use them if we can integrate.

Scanning a couple of pages for MY use, I’m able to pull them into GPS Insight as an overlay (I also talk about overlays and similar concepts for the US Army here):

Then by scanning and overlaying an actual “map page” we can get precise boundaries for each page:

We can then create a “placemark” and put the “pin” precisely at the bottom left corner of the box:

Then we are able to quickly determine the latitude/longitude of each of the 4 box corners. A shortcut for doing so is to right-click the placemark and choose “directions from” which populates the latitude/longitude into the “directions” box:

Because the boxes above/below/next to each share the same points, these latitudes/longitudes don’t need to be computed for every single corner.

Now that we have that information, I will have the ability to put a new capability into GPS Insight which does the following:

• Takes a street address and quickly determines the Map Page/Quadrant
• Allows the user to enter the map page & alpha-numeric “box” and takes them there
• Allow the user to report on activity within a certain map page or even alpha-numeric box

We can do the first one simply right now by typing in the address and simply viewing which map page/alphanumeric box the address is in.

It will take a little bit of development time to allow us to choose a map page and “A-6″ style box in order to take us there, but this is something which we will easily complete within a few hours of work given GPS Insight’s quick turnaround on custom requirements such as this.

Then running a report for a particular area can be done automatically as well, but I will do so manually here using our existing polygon geofence capabilities:

Create a polygon geofence around the square (whether the map page or just a alphanumeric box in question):

We can be EXTREMELY precise when defining the geofence:

Here is the full polygon:

Then we can run a quick report on “Page24″ within GPS Insight to see which vehicles were there, when, and for how long:

7 vehicles went to this location, based on our extremely accurate report — this report completes within 10 seconds and runs through tens of thousands of pieces of information to give you exactly the information you require:

Once we get the map page enhancements into the GPS Insight product, we’ll probably make them freely available, and I’ll update this blog entry. We will document this where we document all of our product enhancements at http://support.gpsinsight.com.

Thanks,

Rob.

You can now enable near-real time radar and cloud images, as well as forecasts from within the 3D mapping component of GPS Insight. Here is a screenshot:

One of the nicest things about the way Google has implemented this within Google Earth is they’ve put the images 19 miles up in the sky, as opposed to on the ground like some other 3rd party weather providers have don in the past. When you’re zoomed down, you can see your vehicles and your landmarks, the roads, etc, as opposed to a big white cloud parked on the ground.

I’m no meteorologist, but I believe 19 miles is artificially high — I travel a lot and it seems to me we don’t go that high before hitting cloudsq. In fact, I’ve fallen through some pretty painful clouds (rain at 2 miles high is frequently big chunks of ice and terminal velocity of a skydiver is 110 mph — ouch) in my 6 year long skydiving career and the highest we typically got out of the plane was 3 miles above earth (15,000 feet or so). [I don't skydive any longer -- kids make you rethink the risk/benefits of that activity...]

That small inaccuracy aside, I’m glad Google put them so high. Here’s why:

This is the United States and a large number of vehicles we track, under cloud cover. We can’t see much below the cloud-covered areas.

Zooming down, we head toward Phoenix, where we are headquartered (Scottsdale) and we still can’t see under the clouds/radar:

Since Scottsdale is typically pretty rain-free, I head toward the closest area under cloud/radar cover, near the border in Yuma, where we have customer who tracks their produce trucks:

Once I break through 25 and 19 miles (radar and clouds respectively) I can see clearly again, and I measure the width and it’s 21.32 miles wide — enough for most typical customers to see their trucks without clouds getting in the way. I’ve put a red box around where you turn weather on & off:

Zooming down again to a similar 19 mile high view of Phoenix we see that there are a LOT of trucks we can see within GPS Insight at that level.

This is obviously a bigger concern for people in Seattle than people in Phoenix, given the frequency of cloud cover. In any case, it’s nice to have weather data available, and also be able to turn it on/off with a single click in case it gets in the way. It’s also nice to live in Scottsdale this time of year. 64 degrees here at 11:30 at night, & 79 tomorrow. Too bad I’m flying through some clouds tomorrow afternoon to a place much colder.

Rob.

We have recently begun to work with the ADOT (Arizona Department of Transportation), and were asked to incorporate mile marker data into GPS Insight for them. Of course they have this information somewhere, but in the time that it will take to get the raw data and process it into GPS Insight, we could simply create these mile markers “manually” and I thought this exercise is worth documenting on the blog.

First, I found a high resolution map of the mile markers online via Google.

Then I took a close-up screenshot of the map for the I-10 [I just traveled this last week myself so I thought we could do some interesting analysis of this data later].

Now I can import this “overlay” into Google Earth and use it as a template for creating the mile markers:

Note that the important thing here is that the part you really want to “trace” is accurately stretched over the map — maps and Google Earth inevitably diverge, since maps are never as accurate (or spherical) as Earth. The other roads/borders will not match exactly unless you change the “keystone” using a graphics editor. It would be nice if Google would add keystone as an editable aspect of overlays in the future (keystone is effectively stretching an image more on one side than on the other).

Now that we have this image, we can create landmarks on top of each “10″ mile marker (the map only shows the “tens”).

Since this particular mile marker is on the edge of what I considered “accurate” (due to keystone) I measured it myself using the Google Earth Path ruler to 10 miles from the border.

Then a quick copy/paste/rename/replace of the original allows me to quickly place the next 14 “tens” mile markers, placing them on the red dots but on the road itself from Google, which is always far more accurate:

In order to move a copied/pasted landmark, make sure the original is “turned off” (otherwise you can’t “grab” the one you want to rename/remove) and then right-click it, choose properties, and then you can move it when your cursor turns to a pointing finger. Remember to change the name (from 10 to 20, 20 to 30, etc.).

Here is the final product (note I created a folder in “my places” and placed the numerically sequential points along with the overlay map):

Then for an additional I-10 definition I will draw a rough polygon landmark around the I-10 which will help me to answer questions like “how much time do my vehicles spend on the I-10 between mile marker 0 (border) and 150 (Phoenix)?”

The key to accurately defining borders around large areas is to use the “compass” area to navigate between clicking between areas. Plus you can right-click to remove your last “incorrect” points and zoom in/out, move, and pan/tilt using the mouse at the top right, since your mouse otherwise is being used to define the polygon.

Now we can easily find a particular mile marker by typing “ctrl-f” for find, then “I-10 40″ to instantly find/double-click that point for instant navigation:

And last (most importantly), you can instantly answer questions about your fleet like “How long did Rob (in the Navigator) take driving to, then back from DisneyLand last week on the I-10 in Arizona between mile markers 0 and 150?”

We see it took me 1:50 to get TO Disneyland on the I-10 and 1:41 to get back during that same stretch of road, and that it took roughly 3 days and 7 hours from the time I left Arizona to the time I returned (since it is on the border at Mile “zero”), by running this report (which takes a split second to complete):

And here is the actul trip itself along with a 6 minute stop (we were traveling with our kids…):

You can see we made it a whopping 83.2 miles before hitting the first of what was many rest stops on our way to DisneyLand…

And that stop was apparently at mile marker 87, 3 miles before 90, between the 80 & 90 we just created:

Thanks for reading through this practical example of how to use GPS Insight and external mapping resources (ADOT mile marker maps, Google Earth, etc.), along with real GPS data to answer questions you may have about your fleet. Of course ADOT would want to answer other questions (response times to accidents in certain areas of the state, proportion of their vehicles in any one particular concentration) but having these landmarks and polygons in the GPS Insight system helps them (and all of our customers) to answer these types of questions.

Here’s the Google Earth file for you to see the results (minus my DisneyLand trip):

http://www.gpsinsight.com/tmp/ADOT Mile Markers.kmz

Rob.

DigitalGlobe just launched a new satellite the other day which will really help us answer the frequently asked question “how often are the maps updated…?”

The WorldView-1 satellite was launched on Tuesday, September 18, 2007, from one of our customers, Vandenberg Air Force Base, in California. We have helped track VIP’s at their air force base in the past.

The new satellite launch is detailed Here.

This will make the difference between the top of this picture and the bottom:

Currently we overlay purchased aerial photos (as we did for this Reading, PA company) using the GPS Insight “overlay” management functionality. But this satellite will hopefully reduce our need for 3rd party aerial images.It is very quick to do this within GPS Insight:

After saving the overlay to disk:

Simply upload it to GPS Insight (or alternatively you can email it to us for automated inclusion in your account):

Then download it to any computer using our 3-D mapping in Google Earth.

Now instead of waiting for better Google Earth imagery from this satellite, your vehicles’ locations will be more clear than this:

Instead they will look like this:

Quite a difference, obviously. This photo, a 10 square mile one, cost only $30 from an aerial photo company, and helps this customer find its heavy equipment which is all over their large yard.

In reality, many major metro areas already have phenomenal aerial/satellite imagery, but this satellite will be a great help for those areas which currently don’t, or for which the imagery is out of date.

Some of our customers will be happy with the new imagery, but in the meantime we help with these overlays where necessary, & wait for the WorldView-1 to start sending down photos of your town.

Thanks DigitalGlobe & Boeing!

Rob.

Well, about 2 weeks ago I was showing a customer how we can pull in aerial photos and I used this as an example. I looked at Google’s new imagery for this area and it was BETTER than my “improved” aerial photo. This is a good practical example of how Google is constantly improving their imagery. Here are some screenshots of the NEW baseball field:

[if you're interested, it's located at lat=40.3654245916, lon=-75.9337693414]

Thanks again Google & Boeing!

Rob.