We added some functionality to our product to help a customer with a recent IRS reality:

Personal usage of take-home vehicles is taxable as income.

Now it’s pretty easy to quantify just how much of that usage is taxable using GPS Insight.

We have a new way to choose which hours of the day for several reports, to include the drive time summary (down to 5 minute levels):

New Time Selection capability within GPS Insight Reports

So when you run a month-long report with the default (00:00 through 00:00), which is what we used to allow (just a full day, not just certain hours of the day), you would get this:

Run a GPS Insight Drive Time Summary for All of May

This shows 193,887 TOTAL miles

Now run it for JUST personal hours (this would vary based on your company’s schedule of course):

Choose your exact hours for the report

The options allow you to specify the time “band” (e.g. 7PM until 5AM in this case) as well as whether to include or exclude trips which happen only partially within that time.  Also, you can apply this to EVERY day or just the start/ending days by clicking “Apply Each Day.”

We will soon have a 3rd “split trips” option which literally split activity in half at the exact time you specify — e.g. if you say 19:00 and a trip starts at 18:00 and ends at 21:00, it will only report 2, not 3 hours & the mileage of those 2 hours.

Additionally, there will be weekend support as well, which will help quantify personal usage (although we already do this in our odd-hours/weekends report.

Here is the result of that particular “personal hours” report:

Quickly determine how many miles need to be taxed

The personal usage miles, based on the 7PM-5AM filter are 29,074 for May, 15% of total miles driven.

A) you may want to curb this usage, since it’s costing your company money for fuel & wear and tear

B) you need to report this as income if it fits the IRS’s definition, and avoid putting your employees in a bad position of owing taxes if/when you/they are audited.

The IRS just announced an audit of all State of California take-home vehicles, reported by Government Fleet Magazine:

IRS is auditing California take home vehicle usage

Here is the link to that article.

Be prepared!  Start quantifying your vehicle usage.  Also, know that GPS Insight stores 3-5 years of your data, so an 18 month audit will take you no time at all to complete.  Good luck with most other GPS providers which only give you 3-6 months of data.  If you want that data, they will usually charge you thousands of dollars for archived data requests.  Not us though…

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.

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.

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.

Funny, we saw this truck on its way home from Disneyland. I think I’ll have a salesperson call to see how they keep tabs on unauthorized usage on Monday:

Unauthorized usage of Company Vehicles

GPS Insight prevents this! Not only will you prevent your drivers abusing/using their take home vehicles on weekends and at night, but you won’t have to worry about your drivers causing accidents when couches fall off of YOUR vehicles. Plus you won’t have to pay for the fuel to move their apartment.

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.

We added 10 second panic capabilities to our EZ-1000 devices yesterday. They have a “panic button” which can be pressed to send a message.

My boys have EZ-1000’s here in Disneyland so I thought I would configure an alert straight to my cell phone if they ever pressed the button (not that they ever were somewhere without us).

Within 20-30 seconds on average, it would “page” me that either “Mickey” or “Chip” (the 2 devices) had pressed the panic button.

This is NOT something we sell to people for their kids — but security firms do use them for their foot and bike/Segway mounted security guards.

Here is the alert:

Panic alert on a GPS Insight EZ-1000 GPS Tracking device

And here was the SMS text message I got when “Chip” pressed the panic button:

Panic alert on a GPS Insight EZ-1000 GPS Tracking device

Then a map shows you their location and using the iPhone, I can walk to them using the “blue” dot which is me (well, if you look at the time, I had actually done this earlier to figure out where they were at beforehand…):

GPS Tracking my kids on Tom Sawyer's Island

This is what might happen to a kid at Disneyland if they get lost on Tom Sawyer’s Island without a Panic Alarm capable EZ-1000:

Jack in Tom Sawyer's jail at Disneyland

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.

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 forgot to turn off an EZ-1000 I had brought on a trip. It was in my overhead luggage (oops).

It still tracked me on the runway (a max speed of 214 until it lost signal), then all the way home while in my trunk.

Run a quick 3D map for Friday:

We took off on time (3:35 flight pushed back at exactly 3:35 & left the runway at 3:40):

Then the unit last reported before losing cell coverage at 214 MPH after turning over the ocean:

I was out of cell range for roughly an hour, and covered 330 miles between Orange County, CA and Phoenix, AZ which means we averaged about 330 MPH:

All of our units except for this one (the EZ-1000) would store that history, but the EZ-1000 is more about where a person is right now (e.g. security guards, police officers) so it does not store data if it loses cell coverage — since we rarely lose cell coverage (except in planes at 33,000 feet…) it’s a non-issue, as you’ll see next.

After landing, it picks right up again, then tracks my vehicle all the way home, even though I had the unit in my suitcase, in my closed metal trunk:

And on the freeway, it is exactly accurate (but at 2 minute updates) relative to my GPSI-4000 at 10 second updates in the same vehicle (red line=10 second with the GPSI-4000, blue line = 2 minutes with the EZ-1000):

Here on the highway there are 2 points 4 seconds apart, with the same exact speed (67 MPH):

The points are 56 feet apart, which seems reasonable for 4 seconds at 67 MPH (technically it should be 393′ but the 1000 takes a couple seconds to transmit vs. the 4000 which is pretty much instant — but close enough– we’re not launching missiles here):

The moral of the story here is that this unit can be used to economically supplement your tracking of freight, high value packages, etc. Just Thursday a customer I visited in El Monte asked if he could use them to track shipments — Given the fact that my trunk is probably thicker metal than the typical trailer, I can say that it should work reasonably well.

Remember these units work for up to 10-15 days in “ping only” mode, and 3 1/2 days at 2 minute updates. Inexpensive external USB-connected batteries work well to extend the life up to a month or two.

This device is very reliable, and easy to use for many security, freight tracking, and occasional tracking needs. Just don’t ask us to sell it to you to track your spouse or kids — we strictly sell for B2B (Business to Business).

Here’s one more picture of the 2 minute EZ-1000 tracking (blue with green movement/speeding dots) vs. “reality” at 10 second updates (red) — it caught me speeding… I wanted to get home in a hurry obviously:

Thanks,

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.

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.

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.

Today a customer of ours in Southern California near our Orange office let us know that they used our product to both help 7 of their ambulances get to the scene of a California police chase that ended in a “horrific crash.” They also let us know they were able to use GPS Insight in order to assess their responsiveness to this large scale emergency.

Here is a video of the news story, where a drunk woman in a stolen SUV tried to escape police and crashed into 5 vehicles going the wrong way down the street in Tustin, California:

http://www.cbs2.com/video/?id=63039@kcbs.dayport.com

Using GPS Insight, their dispatch personnel can view their vehicle locations in real time (1 minute map updates and 2 minute vehicle updates). That screen allows them to also visualize their custom-built color-coded zones, click for a zoomed in detail of a vehicle or speed/stopped time type details. This particular screen shot is from a different company since the ambulance company’s regions and vehicles require understandable privacy. However it gives a good example of what a mid-sized fleet looks like in the GPS Insight dispatch map view.

When the call comes in for the emergency, they probably only had the cross streets, Warner Avenue and Red Hill Ave, in Tustin (technically close to Tustin in Santa Ana). By typing that into the GPS Insight “Find Address” box and zooming/marking it, the location can be instantly found:

This brings up the following map view, from which turn-by-turn directions to (or from) that location to any vehicle or other location/landmark can be brought up just by clicking on the “directions” links:

Now using the mouse scroll wheel, the zoom level allows you to see the two closest ambulances, 76 and 79, as well as their recent history as a “trail.” They are yellow which indicates they’re turned off but haven’t been stopped more than an hour (then they would be red, and this is all configurable by the customer with GPS Insight). By clicking on them we see more information. Ambulance#76 has been stopped for 27 minutes.

Not that this company needs directions — they know exactly where they are going to get to the calls in the most efficient way possible, but for many of our customers, turn-by-turn directions are necessary. All that needs to be done is to simply click on “Directions From Here” and exact directions are shown from that vehicle to the crash site. Note that you can turn on real time traffic and adjust the route simply by dragging the purple route line from one road to another.

Now the dispatcher has all the information necessary to send that emergency vehicle to the scene of the accident.

As for what it looks like in the GPS Insight 3D history at that time, we can run an all vehicles 3D history for that date like this with just a couple clicks:

Now we can “dial in” the time of the accident by gradually opening up the time slider until the first vehicle “arrives” on the scene at 3:22 PM (shown as a green vehicle “78 3/24 15:22″) — since this is a historical map history, we show the date as well.

Then we can open up more “time” to see which other vehicles arrived. The differently colored lines correspond to the paths of different vehicles.

While there may be too many “dots” to easily see which vehicles arrived when, and how long they stayed, quickly clicking on the blue ones will show length of visit information (blue = idling):

Then if we want an exact report, just draw an exact polygon landmark around the crash site (we name it CrashSite here), and run a report as such:

Here is the report which takes less than a second to run, and which tells you exactly which vehicles arrived, and at what exact time (to the second), along with how long they were there.

This data can be exported to Excel for further analysis, and of course the times and speeds of the ambulances from their prior locations when they were dispatched can be investigated as well in great detail using GPS Insight.

We’re glad we helped this company out, and hope the victims recover quickly. Thanks to the ambulance company for helping the victims (and even the suspect) so quickly.

Rob.