GPS Insight | GPS Fleet Tracking Blog » PURCHASING CONSIDERATIONS

Nov 23 2009

Don’t buy GPS Tracking devices from a brand new company!

Category: Better Business Bureau ratings,competition — rdonat @ 4:31 pm

It’s getting ridiculous, lately. I just saw a press release from another company I had never heard of selling a GPS Tracking solution for vehicles. They even misspelled their website in the press release!!! (by the way we have the exact same 30 day money back guarantee and the exact same month-to-month contract type as they mention)

Don't buy from a brand new, start-up GPS tracking company!

They have only had a website since June 2009! We have servers which have been running without being rebooted upwards of 5 times longer than they’ve even been in existence!

Several GPS Insight servers online without reboots for over 2 years!

Here’s how to tell if a company has been around for a while before you go with them:

Look up their web address using “whois” by visiting www.whois.sc/theirdomainname.com such as I did here:

Avoid Startup GPS Tracking companies

You can see they were created just a few months ago on 6/1/2009. Then you can “nslookup theirdomain.com” and get an IP address. Do a “reverse lookup” on that same IP address and see if it’s their domain or a shared computer, which it is in this case:

This company doesn't even own a single dedicated server!

How can someone think of buying such an important product for your company from this type of business?

hmdnsgroup.com doesn’t even have a web page!

blank page at this company's hosting provider

Go one step further:

Looking 1 above & 1 below their IP address (.70 and .72) and you see two utterly unrelated company websites, all sitting there sharing the same computer:

next-door neighbor to a shady GPS tracking player

Then take a look at the code for their login form & see they don’t even own the service themselves!

Don't buy from a GPS Tracking startup company!

Sure, they may be successful, EVENTUALLY (actually, I’ll bet they’re not here a year from now & will check on it…). But do you want your company to be the guinea pig they learn on? No. Call GPS Insight instead. The Better Business Bureau gives us an A and we are one of their Accredited Businesses. We’ve been around 5 years. And by the way, that’s the right number of years for a company in this high-tech space. It’s long enough, but not too long. Our technology is modern day, not too old like some other players in this space. Give us a call and we’ll help you understand the differences.

Thanks,
Rob.

Tags: 30 day money back guarantee, GPS Tracking Companies, no contracts, Vehicle Tracking

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Sep 05 2009

GPS Insight keeps 3 years of your GPS Tracking data

Category: Ad Hoc Reports,competition,Ease of use,GPS INSIGHT ADVANTAGES,New Features,Reporting — rdonat @ 1:03 pm

Most of our competitors give you 3 months of history availability, maybe 6.

Starting in June of 2007, GPS Insight has kept every bit of our customers’ data indefinitely (unless they specifically ask otherwise).

Here is an illustration of going back 2 years for a customer of ours and comparing their 1/2008 mileage vs. their 8/2009 mileage (they have added trucks since then):

Here is January of 2008′s summary:

Compared to last month (where they did over twice as many miles in spite of the economy I’m glad to see!):

Note their max speed is 89 again, almost 2 years later. Their vehicles are probably throttled and it will be trivial to find those speeding events for both months:

Here is the full report, if you want to see what the 1/2008 report looks like:

Both reports took less than a second to run, even though we’re talking about almost a million miles worth of data to crunch through.

If you need more than 3 years worth, just ask — we’ll be able to accommodate that, and if you need access to something over 3 years ago, we can always get it for you from an archive — for free (vs. the thousands of dollars we’ve heard it may cost you to get from other GPS tracking companies)…

Also, we have several “big picture” reports & graphs coming to allow you to see large scale trends across months or years within your fleet. We wouldn’t be able to provide these to customers without at least a couple years’ worth of data, which is why we keep it for your benefit.

Rob.

Tags: GPS Insight, GPS tracking data

Comments (1)

May 25 2009

Hiking to Pinnacle Peak

Category: Arizona,competition,GPS INSIGHT ADVANTAGES,Landmarks,Reports,Running — rdonat @ 3:43 pm

I live in a beautiful area with mountains EVERYWHERE.

Before I moved here, I would climb them every trip.

Now that I’ve lived here, I never do.

Today I took my 9 year old son and his friend to climb (hike) Pinnacle Peak, an easy one nearby my house.

Just checking the map of my trip for the day, and it’s 7.8 miles there — we stayed for 1 hour 23 minutes.

You can see that the parking lot was full so I parked outside on the street, and I got there at 8:40, then left at 10:04:

Here’s a picture from near the top:

If I want to know how recently I was there last, I can quickly create a landmark from a stop report by clicking here:

Then create it, assigning to the Arizona landmark group while I’m at it:

Going all the way back to February, running a landmark report, I find my last time going there:

Note that you can go back >>> 3 YEARS <<< with GPS Insight (or more if you ask nicely) to get information like this.

Most competitors only let you go back 90 days & charge a huge amount if you ever need the data beyond that from them.

The last time I was at Pinnacle Peak was back in February, on 2/2/09, for 1.4 hours.

I need to get there more often. Now that it’s hot again, I think I may need to wait again until Winter.

Rob.

Comments (1)

May 02 2009

GPS Insight and Google Earth

Category: California,competition,Google Earth,GPS Tracking Industry,Mapping — 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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Feb 05 2009

BBB redux (Check your GPS vendor out!)

Category: Better Business Bureau ratings,competition — rdonat @ 5:40 pm

PLEASE CHECK YOUR Better Business Bureau before purchasing a GPS tracking product. For info on how, read my original article on this subject.

A competitor of ours called “Millennium Plus” (really “Horizon Technologies”) just went bankrupt, shutting off access for all of their subscribers.

We have been getting requests to help their customers (we can only sell them a new system at our current $50 off special through 2/15/09, unfortunately).

The one consistent thing I’ve heard from these customers has been “We should have checked the BBB first.”

They have >> NINETY SIX << complaints registered against them in the past 36 months! Why in the world would anyone buy from them?

GPS Insight has >> ZERO << complaints. Check your vendor out before buying!

Look at what pops up when you Google them!

We usually avoid badmouthing our competitors, and are friendly with many. But I’ve always heard shady things from ex-customers/dealers of this company, and I’m glad to see they finally went away for good.

A friend also in the GPS industry just sent me this link, as well:

http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/422/RipOff0422033.htm

Shocker…

Rob.

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Jan 07 2009

Landmark reports are WAY faster too (I forgot to mention that)!

Category: Ad Hoc Reports,competition,Ease of use,Landmarks,New Features,Reporting — rdonat @ 11:02 pm

I guess I forgot to mention an extremely obvious reason why we completely re-architected our landmarks over the past 3 months — SPEED!

GPS Insight allows you to run a “all landmarks, all vehicles” report. I am unaware of any other GPS company which does this (let alone in 2.8 seconds for 50 vehicles and hundreds of landmarks).

With just a couple clicks, I can see EVERY landmark one of our 50 GPS tracking devices for GPS Insight’s “house account” (e.g. our own salespeople, developers, etc.) visited yesterday.

This is the (shortened) report, showing every vehicle’s (50) every stop in every landmark (604):

I just ran the same report for a much larger customer with 750 trucks and 91 landmarks. It took 80 short seconds to run, and quantified almost 150 THOUSAND miles worth of activity, and 6,236 HOURS of activity.

That may be longer than you want to sit and wait for a report — so then you can schedule it to be run automatically and sent to your email daily. In reality, no one looks at a report that big — individual branch or regional managers look at their smaller reports daily, and those still just take a few seconds to run typically.

Please give us a call if you want to set up training on these new capabilities, or advice on how you can use this to achieve better return on your GPS tracking investment.

Rob.

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Oct 14 2008

AT&T coverage and GPS Insight hardware

Category: Cellular Coverage,Google Earth,GPS Tracking,Mapping,Overlays — rdonat @ 8:59 pm

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

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

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Oct 14 2008

GPS Antennas don’t work so well inside the office

Category: Cellular Coverage,GPS Insight Employees — rdonat @ 8:15 pm

So we’ve been a little busy lately & I haven’t had much time to write for the blog.

We’ve been in our new office for a month now, and new or not, GPS antennas generally need to see the sky to work well.

However, this picture shows that they are still reasonably accurate, even inside a building, as this unit spent the night last night after we programmed it for one of our salespeople to put into her vehicle for testing purposes: (the arrow points to where the unit physically was inside our office):

It reported every minute with quite a few “bouncy” points which are due to inaccuracies from receiving bounced signals from the satellite through the halls of our office (this unit spent the night in an interior, no-windows office). Here is a picture of all the various reports (green indicating slight movement, blue indicating no movement):

Once it was installed in Alissa’s car (in the parking garage) and drove away at the end of her day, however, it tracked perfectly, once per minute, within about 5 feet of accuracy or so:

We have been testing our newest hardware offering, and are happy to see it track perfectly.

We put GPS tracking devices of various types on all of our employees’ vehicles for testing and training purposes. Thankfully, we do what our customers do, so our employees don’t mind: We use vehicle groups and permissions to only let a couple employees (the ones doing the development and testing) see all the vehicles. Everyone can see their own vehicle, which is useful when we go to customers and show our car parked in its exact parking space on a web browser or even a Blackberry, using satellite imagery.

Plus we get a discount.

Rob.

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

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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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Apr 08 2008

New California Cell Phone Laws — stop calling your drivers & use GPSI to see where they are

Category: California,cell phone capabilities,Cellular Coverage,GPS Tracking — rdonat @ 2:46 pm

The new California cell phone law goes into effect 7/1/08. Now drivers can be cited for using their cell phones while driving, unless they use a hands free device.

See the CA Cell Phone Law document here.

While GPS Insight users DO use cell phone communication to send and receive group-wide or individual text messages, and to annotate their stops (e.g. they’re stopped when sending them…), overall, the amount of communication while they are driving is lessened significnatly.

A dispatch person may just choose a single group (or all vehicles) and instantly map them with a couple clicks:

Now if I want to see where a particular vehicle is (or which vehicle is closest to a particular area) I can just double click on that vehicle:

Additionally, we now have given our customers the ability to use cell phone text messages to find the closest 10 vehicles to another vehicle or location (within 10 miles, which is configurable). For instance, if you want to know the 10 closest vehicles to “TC1-CREW” (above), this customer can send a text message of “gps tc1-crew close” and receive a text message of the closest vehicles, how far they are, which direction, and if they are moving (and how fast or for how long have they been stopped).

Additionally the customer can just send “gps TC1-CREW” and get a text message of where that vehicle is. This is even useful if you don’t feel like walking to a computer to find out. A quick SMS text message is returned within seconds (almost instantly on AT&T, maybe 10 seconds on Verizon, our two carriers of choice). It tells you the address (or landmark), and vehicle status (stopped 10 minutes, idle stop 20 minutes, 72 mph NW, etc.). You can even abbreviate the truck name, or give a partial truck name which will return all vehicles matching (e.g. TC will return both TC1 and TC2). Here is the “console” record of some sample activity. Bear in mind the “Message” is coming from, and being sent back to the driver’s/supervisor’s cell phone:

(We break it up into multiple text messages for easy reading when necessary)

Also bear in mind if you have a higher end phone, we can help you easily display all your vehicles on a map on your cell phone.

Zooming down:

This is very useful to keep track of your fleet, but has a nice side benefit of helping your drivers to avoid breaking the new California (and other states’) cell phone laws while driving.

Rob.

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

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