Feb 03 2010

About to send our MILLIONTH Alert and perform our BILLIONTH Alert Check

Category: Alerts, Miscellaneousrdonat @ 11:50 pm

I have a daily report which comes to me which tells me how close we are to hitting 2 major Alert milestones:

GPS Insight's Millionth Alert and Billionth Check are coming soon!

GPS Insight's Millionth Alert and Billionth Check are coming soon!

We are very close to sending our MILLIONTH alert out.

Shortly thereafter (unless drivers stop causing alerts which, uh, isn’t very likely…), we will process our BILLIONTH alert check.

We process a huge number of alerts checks and send quite a few each day.

In the short time I’ve been typing this blog article, we have processed 15,282 checks, yielding a relatively small number of alerts — 3.

This is because it’s night and most of our customers’ drivers aren’t driving, let alone speeding, idling, or going in or out of landmarks.  Chances are those were odd-hours alerts…

I’ll let everyone know when we hit these marks.

[worth noting, on 8/15/2009, when I last wrote about this, we were only at 350 million checks and 419,000 alerts.  Customers are really starting to utilize our alerts more now than they have in the past]

Rob.

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Dec 20 2009

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Happy New Year from GPS Insight!

Category: Miscellaneousrdonat @ 5:56 pm
Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Happy New Year from GPS Insight

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Happy New Year from GPS Insight

Click here for the animated holiday card!

Thanks for everyone’s support in 2009 & best wishes for the Holidays and a Happy New Year.

Rob.

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Dec 19 2009

GPS Insight adds over 1,000 devices in one day

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

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

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

19 minute lunch stop into the 11:00 Hour

In-N-Out stop for Joe Vidmar

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.

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Dec 15 2009

Watch some of the GPS Insight staff “get down” in a hilarious dancing elves video

Category: Humor, Miscellaneousbbarker @ 12:30 pm

Watch some of the GPS Insight staff “get down” in a hilarious dancing elves video.

Happy Holidays!

(click below to watch the video)
GPSI Dancing Elves Video


Nov 25 2009

Happy Thanksgiving from GPS Insight!

Category: GPS Insight Employees, Miscellaneousrdonat @ 10:18 am
Happy Thanksgiving from GPS Insight

Happy Thanksgiving from GPS Insight

On behalf of all of our employees, we wish to express our gratitude to all of our customers and vendors (and even some competitors…). We hope you have a great Thanksgiving holiday. We will have Support available on Thanksgiving, but it will be cell-phone based, and you may get someone in a Turkey Coma.

Rob.

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Nov 01 2009

The scariest Halloween costume EVER!

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

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...!)

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

Halloween GPS tracking with an EZ-1000

Rob.


Oct 29 2009

Sahara Race almost over!

Category: Egypt, Landmarks, Miscellaneous, People Tracking, Running, TT-1900rdonat @ 9:40 am

My brother in law Keir has covered over 30 of the total 54 miles for today as of 9:15 PST. This final 5th stage requires him to go 54 miles in 40 hours.

Here’s a picture of what we’ve tracked so far since he left Base Camp 5:

GPS Tracking Keir across the Sahara

GPS Tracking Keir across the Sahara

Rob.


Oct 27 2009

Egypt race update

Category: Egypt, Google Earth, Miscellaneous, Routing, Running, TT-1900rdonat @ 10:17 pm

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

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

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

Racing the Planet Sahara Race standings for stage 3

Rob

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Oct 26 2009

Racing in the Sahara

Category: Egypt, Google Earth, Miscellaneous, People Tracking, Running, TT-1900rdonat @ 7:57 am

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

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

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.


Oct 24 2009

Racing the planet in Egypt — GPS Tracking a race across the Sahara

Category: Egypt, Google Earth, Miscellaneous, People Tracking, Running, TT-1900rdonat @ 8:02 pm

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

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

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

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.

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