GPS Insight Blog » GPS Tracking Industry

May 14 2009

NAFA 2009 in New Orleans

Category: EZ-1000, GPS Insight Employees, GPS Tracking, GPS Tracking Industry, Garmin Integration, Miscellaneous, New Features — rdonat @ 12:32 pm

At NAFA 2009 (National Association of Fleet Administrators), we unveiled several new hardware and software offerings. Notably:

Garmin Integration
Driver Log/DOT Hours of Service application coming in 2009
EZ-1000 & PNP-1500 hardware
Switches & Sensors capabilities

This year’s conference was in New Orleans. Here are some pics of our booth and

The 5 of us who attended (Ryan, Jolene, Rob, Alissa, & Elliot) (wearing our Bourbon Street beads…)

Then Elliot donned a Mardi Gras outfit & joined in the parade…

We had a good time & the show went well.

Here is a video interview of me which Automotive Digest published after the show.

Rob.

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May 02 2009

GPS Insight and Google Earth

Category: California, GPS Tracking Industry, Google Earth, Mapping, competition — rdonat @ 4:51 pm

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.

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Aug 30 2008

Better Business Bureau and GPS Tracking companies

Category: Better Business Bureau ratings, Company Efficiency, Fleet Tracking, GPS Insight Employees, GPS Tracking, GPS Tracking Industry, Miscellaneous — rdonat @ 5:08 pm

GPS Insight is a Better Business Bureau accredited business. We applied and were granted this designation in May of 2007, 2 years after we were formally incorporated, on 4/14/2005. GPS Insight technically began as a consulting project, and my first billable work on it was 8/24/2004, over 4 years ago. This was work done by GPS Insight’s holding company, Sedonatech, Inc., an Illinois S Corporation in business since 4/1/2000.

Here is our information from the BBB: [you can check these yourself at bbb.org, under "USA Site/Check out a business"]

Today, I got my BBB newsletter in the mail, and was curious which of the other GPS vendors we come across were also accredited by the BBB.

I started searching, and thought I would share and maintain this list, periodically checking for changes, so our customers and employees can also know what the Better Business Bureau thinks of them.

These are the BBB rating links to some are the companies we typically hear our customers are (or were) looking at, in no particular order:

@Road:B, but not BBB Accredited

Fleetmatics: Unsatisfactory and not BBB Accredited

Teletrac: Unsatisfactory and A-, East and West offices

Sage Quest: A & BBB Accredited

Discrete Wireless: A-, but not BBB Accredited
Networkcar: No listing

Navtrak: A, but not BBB Accredited

Rocky Mountain Tracking: A- and Accredited

Fleetilla: No listing

Why do I list our competitors here? I feel that prospective customers should know about the market, and know who’s who, and does what. There are some other good GPS vendors out there, and this may help you to determine that as well. But we are happy to help you with a risk free trial against any of them, to prove that we not only have the best GPS Fleet Tracking product on the market, but that we’re also the best value, and have the best support available. Plus we can get you up and running same day in any of our 4 local markets, or next-day/second-day depending on how quickly you want to start tracking your vehicles.

One thing you’ll notice about our competitors’ websites (you’ll have to look them up yourself, I’m not that charitable to them…):

None of them will let you see a live action demo of their maps, their reports, or their overall product.

We have live demos, video demos, and tons of screenshots of our reports, etc. online at www.gpsinsight.com — please take a look. Our product is something that we are proud to show on the website, without forcing you to enter your information, email address, etc. first. An educated customer is the best type — please educate yourself on our website, check out our competitors, have us do a same-day WebEx demo for you, then do a side-by-side, risk free, 30 day money back guarantee trial. You’ll see the difference, or we wouldn’t put our product out there for everyone to see, including our competition!

I usually sign about 1 refund check a quarter and none yet in Q3 of 2008… [or Q4 of 2008 or Q1 of 2009 either]

Thanks,

Rob.

Tags: Better Business Bureau ratings, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking

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