Updates and features of our real-time GPS fleet tracking system
May 25 2010
Here is a really good article about how GPS works, and the new satellites going up to replace the aging ones out there now:
GPS has become critical to EVERYTHING (to include GPS Insight...)
It’s really worth reading if you are interested in this world-changing technology.
Rob.
Apr 15 2010
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
Apr 14 2010
This is very to the point:
Our reports and proactive alerts help you to ensure your drivers are not idling.
It’s both wasteful and impacts our environment.
I pulled up a relatively new customer at random & ran an idling report for them & was happy to see that they CUT THEIR IDLING 75% WITH PROACTIVE MANAGEMENT!
Here is how I ran the report:
Run a GPS Insight Idle Time History Report
The report came up in 1.6 seconds & quantified 33,400 hours of driving since January, and the Purple Line (the important line) shows a marked decrease from a high of 20% idling to a current low of 5%:
75% Reduction in idling percentage
The full report shows all the particulars & shows very clearly the effects of both using GPS Insight as well as managing the drivers to stop idling:
Decrease from 20% to 5% idling over 3 months
Note that this is only one of our thousand customers, and only 234 vehicles. I like the fact that GPS Insight truly is helping our customers make a big difference both in terms of saving fuel money, and the environment.
Another report shows that they have saved roughly TWO THOUSAND IDLING HOURS across their fleet of 234 vehicles by eliminating that 15% idling (based on 13,000 hours driven in the past month). With fuel costs plus wear & tear easily costing $5 per hour, they’ve seen a $10,000 PER MONTH savings, which is $42 per vehicle. We charge them $32.95. So they make $9 per month just by reducing idling, and now they have all the other benefits of GPS Insight for free – efficient dispatch, proof of delivery, proof of driver hours worked, reduction in speeding, theft recovery, and so on.
Plus they’re not pi$$ing on the planet anymore…
Click to learn more about our GPS Fleet Tracking System.
Rob.
Mar 12 2010
Keir is still hiking across the harsh Chilean desert as we speak, tracked with a 5.9 oz. satellite tracker in his pack.
Keir hiking across the Chilean desert
Not to be outdone, I covered 40 miles today in the harsh wilderness myself, with only the assistance of 20 ski lifts, gravity, 2 skis and a couple of beers:
Ski tracking in Deer Valley at Park City UT
Just kidding, obviously a lot harder to walk 20-some miles across the desert than ski around a bunch. Maybe I should invite Keir next time…
Rob.
Mar 12 2010
Keir is doing well, in 112th place (out of 127 left in the race), and there are a LOT of people who have dropped out.
112th out of 127 left in the race
The site says he has raced for just shy of 40 hours. We are tracking him every hour with a GPS Insight TT-1900.
I ran a track like this:
GPS Track of Keir across a Chilean desert
And see where he’s gone (roughly — we update once an hour):
GPS Track of Keir across a Chilean desert
This shows 94.2 miles, but it’s been more than that, since he’s not racing in a straight line.
Good luck Keir! He’s got 1 more 25 mile day, then a 50 some mile day tomorrow to complete this race, his second Racing the Planet race.
Rob.
Mar 09 2010
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.
Feb 21 2010
I took my boys (7 & 9) skiing (snowboarding they correct me every time…) up to Flagstaff AZ this weekend.
I brought my Garmin Edge 705 (a Garmin for bikes, basically) & put it in my coat pocket to get a really good feel for where we went during the weekend. It logs every 10 seconds for eventual upload (vs. once a minute in real time for the EZ-1000 I brought along as well).
Garmin EDGE 705
They are really nice, and we don’t sell them — I bought mine at the bike shop. [We do sell Garmin's for vehicles and can integrate them with our GPSI-4000 GPS tracking solution though...]
The Garmin is an optimist, and thinks I ran up all those hills & burned 5248 calories in the process (had I brought the wireless heart monitor it would have known better):
Garmin's interpretation of my Skiing with my kids
This is a great image of GPS Insight vs. Garmin (bear in mind we are an “ACTIVE” tracking system whereas the Garmin is “PASSIVE” and needs you to upload the data eventually):
GPS Insight vs. Garmin for ski tracking
The “pins” are EZ-1000 points [every minute while in cell coverage, which is spotty on the mountain]. The yellow circles are Garmin points (a LOT more of them).
Here is the Garmin unit track of where we went (and where I remembered to turn the unit on…):
Skiing at Snowbowl in Flagstaff AZ
It’s nice to have that for sports usage. But if you want to track your vehicles in real time, that’s not an option — you need an active tracking solution like GPS Insight. Both are great products — just for entirely different needs.
And here are my cold kids. Lots of snow this weekend, and way colder than they’re used to living in the desert.
Rob's kids in their cold-weather snowboarding attire
Rob.
Feb 03 2010
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!
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.
Jan 19 2010
I pretty much have a never-ending supply of EZ-1000′s so I brought one skiing with my 2 boys on a recent trip.
Jack, my older son, is old enough to go skiing (boarding, he would correct me) without me. Actually, he has officially passed me by — he does black runs I refuse to do (small on a board is way better than big on skis when it comes to moguls).
I wanted to know where he was at one point so I ran a quick mobile map on my iPhone & put it in “compass mode” so I could see what direction he was from me.
Here it is (I’m the blue dot, Jack is the red pin):
GPS Insight EZ-1000 tracks my snowboarding son on the mountain
Here he really was (my eyes are better than the 3 megapixel camera on the iPhone…) — note that he’s between the lift & the ski patrol “house” just like the map shows it:
GPS Insight EZ-1000 tracks my snowboarding son on the mountain
I ran a 3D history of that device for the 2 days I remembered to bring it and put it in Jack’s pocket & it puts him exactly where my iPhone shows him at 1:44 (note the time in the first screen shot). Waiting 4 minutes at the bottom of the hill for his 2 friends:
Showing skiing activity using an EZ-1000 from GPS Insight
Also interesting is the straight lines which depict the lifts very clearly. The main lifts are in the “clutter” of dots on the left side, but the lifts we went on once each are really easy to spot toward the top right.
It’s easy to see which runs got the most use by turning off the “time slider” and looking at just the blue path:
GPS Tracking my son on the ski (board) slopes
Here are my two boarders:
Jack & Ryan on a snowboarding trip
And by looking at the GPS track as well as how well he was jumping and grinding, I can tell Jack went through the terrain park most of all:
Jack grinding/jumping off a box in the terrain park
I’ll try embedding a Facebook video I have of him going through the terrain park here:
Rob.
Dec 20 2009
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.