GPS Insight Blog » GPS Insight Employees

Aug 21 2010

$90 Parking Ticket is proven ridiculous (but we still have to pay it)

Category: Arizona, Driver Accountability, GPS Insight Employees, Google Earth — rdonat @ 1:10 pm

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.

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

Comments (0)

Aug 18 2010

GPS Insight makes the Inc. 500 List at #281

Category: GPS INSIGHT COMPANY SPECIFIC, GPS Insight Employees, PURCHASING CONSIDERATIONS — rdonat @ 9:44 am

We are very happy to make the prestigious 2010 Inc. 500 list of fastest growing privately held companies in America. Here is the link to our Company Listing.

We made the list at #281 with 3 year growth of 1,075.7% growth and 2009 revenues of $7.7 million.

GPS Insight included in this year's Inc. 500 List

My “words of wisdom” were somehow chosen as #1 on that page:

* Rob Donat will not be held responsible if you take these words of advice and drown, literally or figuratively...

And, drum roll please, here is the citation:

GPS Insight in the Inc. 500 at #281

We’re in good company:

Past Inc. 500 Honorees

Huge thanks to everyone who has helped us make this list, and more importantly, grow and thrive in this miserable economy, as we have — self-funded and privately held.

Thanks to our Customers, Employees, Partners, Families, and Friends.

Now on to trying to stay on this list for next year… (we may slip to the Inc. 5000 — 1075% 3 year growth is hard to sustain — just ask Google.)

Thanks!

Rob.

Tags: fleet tracking companies, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking, inc 500, telematics

Comments (1)

Aug 11 2010

Was that my employee that just drove by…? (or my wife?…)

Category: Arizona, GPS Insight Employees, cell phone capabilities, mobile mapping — rdonat @ 10:26 pm

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.

Tags: gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking, iPhone map, mobile mapping

Comments (1)

Jul 18 2010

Always making things better

Category: Alerts, GPS Insight Employees, Google Earth, Mapping — rdonat @ 3:10 pm

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.

Tags: dashboard dashlets, fleet tracking software, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking

Comments (1)

May 18 2010

Sneak peek at our new Trip Efficiency Report!

Category: Alerts, Company Efficiency, Driver Accountability, Extreme Return on Investment, Fuel Savings, GPS Insight Employees, Google Earth, Reporting, Reports, detecting unauthorized vehicle usage — rdonat @ 10:21 pm

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.

Tags: fleet tracking comapnies, gps fleet reporting, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps tracking reports, gps vehicle tracking

Comments (0)

May 01 2010

GPS Insight exhibits at NAFA 2010 in Detroit (4th NAFA for us)

Category: Conferences, GPS Insight Employees — rdonat @ 1:58 pm

6 of us just got back from NAFA 2010 in Detroit. NAFA is the National Association of Fleet Administration (now known as the “Fleet Management Association”).

It’s a great conference for us to meet with existing and new customers, as well as partner vendors.

We were so busy this year, that for the first time, we forgot to get a group photo! Doh. Better than being bored I suppose.

Here are a couple photos of our booth this year:

GPS Insight exhibits at NAFA 2010 in Detroit

Sorry to Alissa & Evelyn who didn’t make it into the picture (Evelyn was taking it).

All I got was the back of my head this year.

Here are some articles about the past 2 two years (Salt Lake & New Orleans)

Rob.

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

Comments (0)

Apr 20 2010

Why I hate Microsoft (or why resetting your Ford Sync GPS is a bad idea)

Category: Availability, California, GPS Insight Employees, GPS Navigation, Google Earth, Routing, competition — rdonat @ 10:49 pm

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.

Tags: gps fleet tracking, GPS Navigation, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking, microsoft, system availability

Comments (0)

Apr 15 2010

Happy 5th Birthday GPS Insight

Category: Fleet Tracking, GPS Insight Employees, Miscellaneous — rdonat @ 11:42 am

Today, 4/15/2010, is the “legal” 5th birthday of GPS Insight (as a product we celebrated back in August). I “spun off” GPS Insight from my consulting company as its own legal entity 4/15/2005.

In that time, we have grown from one customer & 286 trucks to having sold over 1,000 customers & over 20,000 tracking devices.

We have gone from 3 employees to over 30, and now have 8 digit revenues and are sustainably profitable (much better than 5 digit revenues and 6 digit losses back 5 years ago…)

My wife was nice enough to remember the “birthday” and send this bouquet of cookies to the office:

GPS Insight 5th birthday

Many Heartfelt Thanks to everyone who has helped us make it to this important milestone. It has been challenging for everyone through the past few years with the economy like it is, and we are proud to have helped our customers save money, identify problems, and keep their drivers and businesses safe with GPS Insight’s GPS fleet tracking product.

Here’s to the next 5 years!

Rob

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

Comments (1)

Mar 28 2010

We use GPS Insight all the time OURSELVES!

Category: Alerts, GPS Insight Employees, Stolen Vehicle Recovery, cell phone capabilities, detecting unauthorized vehicle usage — rdonat @ 1:31 pm

One of our salespeople, Alissa, just sent me this. Nice to know we are getting use out of our own product. She was waiting for her car to be towed & didn’t want it stolen over night (the radiator died).

using an alert to ensure a vehicle isn't stolen

We get hooked on all the various uses of GPS Insight ourselves as well! Learn more about our tracking alerts or the rest of our GPS vehicle tracking solution by visiting our website.

Rob.

Tags: gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking, odd-hours, tracking alerts

Comments (1)

Mar 09 2010

Not all ski slope GPS Tracking devices are made equal

Category: EZ-1000, GPS Insight Employees, Google Earth, Skiing — rdonat @ 1:54 pm

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.

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

Comments (0)